MinnesotaWriter

Thanks! That certainly would be an interesting scenario. I don't think Maddy realizes yet that there are diapers her size, and not just pull-ups. I wouldn't think she would be disappointed with diapers instead if that were to happen. For sure, there are lots of different ways diapers might come into play for Maddy.

Looks like another site is coming down hard on ABDL content, which is incredibly annoying. Wattpad went and shadowbanned a bunch of stories based on AI flagging them for not meeting their standards. Apparently they will be doing a manual review of all those stories to determine if they will get deleted or not. There's more info about that on the Wattpad Reddit site: https://www.reddit.com/r/Wattpad/comments/1btcjsy/update_on_tag_issues/ In addition to that, the ABDL story tag is no longer visible on Wattpad. Searching for it yields no results. Seems likely they will be coming down hard on all of that content fairly soon. I'm making sure to remove my stories from any of those tags, but I think my days writing on that site are numbered.

Chapter 16: As Anticipated It was amazing how many things could get lost all year in a locker. I stood in front of my locker with a backpack and a garbage bag in front of me on the floor, sorting out the contents of my locker one-by-one. Some of it got tossed in my backpack to keep. Most things went into the trash bag. The locker was now about halfway empty. By the end of the school year, the locker had reached its maximum capacity. I had already tossed more than a dozen long-lost pens and pencils into my backpack. I was sure I’d find another couple dozen by the time I was through with emptying the locker. There were a number of overdue library books I needed to bring to the school library before heading out on the bus, an inside-out, balled up jacket I had left once it had become too warm outside to need it. There were half-empty plastic water bottles, crumpled up papers from homework assignments, and textbooks that I thankfully would never need to ever open again. “You’re not finished yet?” Emma asked as she walked up next to me and stared into the abyss that was my locker. I shrugged as I tossed out a Spanish workbook that I wasn’t going to need again. It was true that my locker was fuller than most, but that hadn’t been the main reason for how long it was taking me to get it all emptied out. The conversation about bedwetting with my parents and sister yesterday evening had given me a lot to think about. The pills had proved to not be much of a problem. Yes, they had made it impossible to wet the bed in the middle of the night, as I would have preferred, but I didn’t have any difficulty peeing in bed once my alarm had woken me up in the morning. I was rather proud of how I had figured out a way to wake up early without disturbing the rest of my family. Waking up to an alarm blaring from an earbud wasn’t the ideal way to start the morning, but it gave me time to wet the bed and relax before getting ready for school. However, despite needing to pee in the morning, the puddle that had formed on the bed around my bottom was a lot smaller than any of the other times I had peed in the bed previously, proof that the medication had done its job of limiting my overnight urine output. Mom, of course, had been a bit disappointed when she woke me up. She made sure to clarify that she wasn’t unhappy with me in any way, but it was clear she had higher expectations for how the medicine would perform. She had very much been expecting to see dry sheets and pajamas in the morning. “Eww, is that what I think it is?” Emma pointed to a discolored plastic baggie that had been revealed when I had taken the book out of the locker. I grimaced as I looked down at what was likely the remnants of an unfinished lunch from months ago. That was one of the problems with my locker. I always intended to get stuff out again right away, but as soon as it became buried, it would slip completely out of my mind. Emma held her nose in disgust as I pinched the corner of the baggie and quickly deposited it into the garbage bag. I hoped there weren’t any additional baggies like that in the locker, but I was beginning to dread what I might end up discovering closer to the bottom. “So, about the all-nighter? What did your mom say about the sleepover?” Emma asked. I sighed and rolled my eyes. It was apparent that my friends were going to keep interrogating me until they got an answer. I answered the first half of that question truthfully. “Doing an all-nighter is a no-go. My parents don’t want us drinking all that caffeine and going crazy.” “That’s silly,” Emma said as she watched me continue to empty the locker. “We wouldn’t have any problem getting away with that at my place. My parents wouldn’t care one bit as long as we didn’t wake them up.” “Then we can go that later in the summer. Just don’t mention it to my mom.” “But, like, we’re still good for a regular sleepover next Friday on your birthday?” I paused a second before answering her question. I didn’t want to say that Mom hadn’t decided yet. That would just be an open invitation to unwelcome questions about what could have changed to make it so I couldn’t have sleepovers anymore. Besides, I was sure that I’d have access to pull-ups next week, which would allow Mom to say yes to my friends spending the night. “Of course.” “That’s good,” Emma said. “I’ll go let Angie know. She’s a lot closer to getting her locker cleaned up than you are. I’ll see you at lunch.” I watched as Emma darted off around the corner, weaving through all the other students who were busy getting their hallway lockers cleaned out for the year as well. Well, I was committed to the sleepover now, which meant I was going to need to get my parents to get me the pull-ups or risk an even more awkward conversation with my friends about how we weren’t actually going to have a sleepover next week. But it wasn’t time to ask my parents about pull-ups yet. There was still the doctor’s appointment to consider on Monday. That appointment had me worried. I didn’t like going to the doctor, even for normal yearly checkups. There was that weird thing they squeezed around my arm to take my pulse, which nearly sent me into a panic attack every time they did it. But apart from the normal poking and prodding, the worst of it was always the needles. At least this time, I could be confident that I wouldn’t need to get any new vaccinations. But what would the doctor make of my bedwetting? I felt confident that I had fooled my entire family so far. They hadn’t expressed a single inkling of doubt that my bedwetting was anything other than genuine. The idea of someone wetting the bed on purpose had to be so far out there that it probably wasn’t ever a scenario they had considered. But what would happen when I was examined by an actual doctor? What if there was something I had missed during my times of faking bedwetting, something I had gotten wrong that would indicate to them that something was not as it seemed? What if they ran all of their tests and determined that they couldn’t find anything wrong with me at all? Would they chalk it up to just a random fluke of genetics? Or would they begin to think something was amiss? On the other hand, the doctor’s appointment could prove useful to my quest to get pull-ups. Surely, they would be aware of that being an option for dealing with bedwetting. Perhaps they might even recommend it as a solution. That would be ideal. That way, I could still at least pretend that I wasn’t all that happy about wearing pull-ups. I had to keep in mind that I was supposed to be behaving like someone who wasn’t happy at all about having to suddenly deal with bedwetting. I resumed my inspection of the contents of my locker. To my great relief, I didn’t find any additional bags of moldy sandwiches. <><><> Despite my older sister’s warning about the side effects she had experienced when she had previously been taking this medication for her own bedwetting, I had felt perfectly fine all day long. I was tired after coming home from school, but that was just because I hadn’t gotten my usual amount of sleep. I hadn’t woken up at weird times in the middle of the night at all. Grace’s main complaint about the medication was that it had given her some extremely painful headaches. My head hadn’t hurt, and as far as I could tell, nothing else seemed to be off about my body. That hadn’t stopped me from constantly wincing and rubbing my head all morning – especially when Mom and Grace were around. I needed to give them as many reasons as possible to stop with the pills and try to move on to another solution. I continued with the act as Grace unlocked the front door to let me in. I groaned and rubbed my head as I eased my overly full backpack down onto the floor. “You feeling alright?” Grace asked. “How did it go last night?” I groaned again. “No, your stupid pills didn’t even work. The only thing they gave me was this lousy headache.” “That’s too bad,” Grace said. “Maybe you’ll have better luck tonight. Oh, and Mom left a note for you in the kitchen. She wanted to make sure you got your laundry done.” That was just great. Nothing like being reminded of additional chores the minute I was finally free from school and homework for the summer. Still, I knew better than to disobey, and this request suddenly gave me a good idea. There were still about twenty minutes until Jackson got home from school, enough time to try out something new I had been wanting to experience. I followed Grace as she walked up the stairs ahead of me. She’d be secluded in her bedroom again until it was time to walk over to the bus stop to collect my younger brother when he was dropped off later this afternoon. I grabbed my full laundry hamper and hauled it all the way to the laundry room in the basement. Yes, this was going to be perfect. Ever since I had discovered how much I had enjoyed wetting myself in bed earlier this week, I had been desperately curious to see what it would be like to do that in different situations. But there were a couple of challenges with trying out this new desire. The first was that there were very few places where I could easily pee my pants without causing a massive mess. Most of our house was carpeted. I didn’t even want to think about how much of a pain it would be to try to clean up that much urine out of the carpet. That left me with a few options. My bed, of course, worked perfectly because of the waterproof mattress. I considered peeing my pants with my clothes on in the bathtub but couldn’t bring myself to find that to be an acceptable option. It just felt too weird to urinate in a spot where I and the rest of my family would later be standing. That left the laundry room in the basement. Its cement floor would make clean-up easy. Plus, there was even a drain on the floor, so if I were to pee myself over that, clean-up would be even easier. That was far and away the best location, especially as I was not as likely to be interrupted, and it would be able to easily hear someone approaching from upstairs. Having decided on a location, there was still another major obstacle, which was that I was rarely left at home by myself. I was hoping that would change this summer now that I would be turning thirteen in a week. In previous summers, Mom had put Jackson in a daycare-like summer camp that he would go to most days for the entirety of summer break. As for me, my schedule had varied. There were day and overnight camps that I would get signed up for. When I wasn’t doing that, I was often spending the day at one of my friend’s places if a parent or older sibling happened to be home. But be allowed to stay at home all on my own? Absolutely not. I wasn’t sure how many good opportunities I would get to experiment with peeing my pants during the day, so I had to be ready to make the most of them when they did show up. The benefit of being in the basement was that I could easily tell where everyone else was in the house. I would be able to hear Grace’s footsteps the moment she started walking down the stairs to the main floor. I had to guess that she wasn’t going to be coming to the basement, but if she was, I would have ample warning to straighten things up quickly. I had worked extra hard to stay hydrated the last couple of hours at school in preparation for this possibility, but now I was wondering if I would be able to pull it off. I ran through the scenario once more in my head. I would change into an old pair of leggings from my hamper. I would stand in the corner of the laundry room where there was a drain in the floor. I would wet my pants there, where it would be easiest to clean up afterward. I would allow myself some time to enjoy the experience before using some of my other dirty clothes to dry off and mop up everything from the floor. Then, everything could be tossed in the washing machine, and no one else would have a clue what had happened once I had changed back into my regular clothes for the day. All so complicated. It would be a lot easier if I simply had a pull-up. I took off my leggings and replaced them with another pair from the laundry hamper. That was one of the strange things about this new interest. I didn’t have any desire to pee myself without any clothes on. I wondered why that was? With this new pair of leggings on, I positioned myself right over the small drain set into the cement floor. I listened carefully. There was no sound from my sister moving around upstairs. This would be another first for me. I had never peed myself while standing before. I assumed that it would be easier to do than while lying down. I spread my legs apart slightly and focused on trying to get my bladder to release. The bottom of my pants began to get warm, and then a warm, wet sensation began to run down both of my legs. It was exhilarating in a way I couldn’t define. Part of it was tied to the physical sensation of what I was doing, but there was something else as well. Was there a certain amount of excitement that came from doing something so socially forbidden? Like always, once I started, there was no stopping it at all. Not that I in any way wanted it to stop. I wished that this feeling could go on forever rather than just the thirty seconds that it would take for my bladder to fully empty. It had been every bit as enjoyable as I had anticipated all day long. The only problem was that it was over far too soon. I looked down at my feet. I knew I had forgotten something. I hadn’t taken off my socks, which were now soaked. For some reason, I had figured that the urine would just go straight through the bottom of my pants and stream onto the floor. I hadn’t considered that it my might run down my legs to my feet. Even then, the drain had proven to be quite effective, as there was only a small puddle remaining beneath me despite how much I had peed. With the sound of urine dripping onto the floor now over, I listened intently again for any movement upstairs. There was complete silence. At any moment now, Grace should head down to the front door to wait for Jackson. I looked back down at the puddle beneath my feet. Again, this would have been so much easier if I had been wearing a pull-up. I wouldn’t have even had to sneak downstairs. I could have done this in the comfort of my own bedroom. I thought back to that girl I had seen at the mall, the one who had been about Jackson’s age, getting her pull-up changed in the restroom. For a moment, I wished that was me. Faking bedwetting was one thing. Pulling that off was easy, given my sister’s history of bedwetting. And wearing pull-ups at night would be an easy secret to keep, even from my friends. But to have accidents during the day was something entirely else. That would call for a much more thorough investigation into what was going on with my body. Besides, I didn’t think I could survive the shame of having my parents, Grace, or Jackson, witness me wetting my pants during the day. And that would make my task of hiding pull-ups from my friends nearly impossible, not to mention what I would have to do at school. No, that wasn’t an option, despite how much I would enjoy being able to wet my pants at any moment whenever I wanted to. But I consoled myself with the possibility that once I got my hands on some pull-ups to wear at night, I could get away with wearing them occasionally during the day. The worst part of it was that I had to clean up right away, rather than continuing to stand in the corner in my wet clothes. The only good thing was that the mess was relatively easy to clean up. I wet some of my clothes in the sink next to the washing machine and used them to mop up the small puddle of urine that surrounded the drain. Satisfied that I’d managed to get everything cleaned up, I tossed the rest of my clothes in the washing machine – along with a large amount of detergent – and got it started before changing back into the leggings I had worn to school. The pounding of distant footsteps told me that Grace was now coming down the stairs to the main floor. I waited until I’d heard the front door slam shut before I made my way back upstairs. My heart was still racing as I shut the door to my bedroom behind me. With all of these new things to explore, this was going to be the best summer ever. I retrieved an old magazine from the bottom of the drawer beneath my bed and flipped instantly to the right page, my eyes fixated on a pair of special undergarments. If everything went right, in less than a week they would be mine. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

I think it is fair to say that Maddy hasn't quite thought through all of the long-term implications for what happens after she has established herself as a bedwetter. We'll get a good look at how it plays out, it's safe to say that it could lead to a lot of interesting situations. That's certainly what the pills are supposed to do. But, like most medications, it doesn't mean they work 100 percent of the time or work the same for everyone who takes it. That would be one option for Maddy to get away from using the pills.

It does seem a little extreme, but there is a certain line of thought in the parenting world that pull-ups/diapers are best avoided for bedwetting, and there could be a bunch of other reasons why they didn't do it for Grace and are avoiding it for Maddy. I think that if they had used pull-ups successfully at any point for Grace, that this might have been brought up as a solution for the sleepover, but we'll have to see when we learn more about the motives they have for those decisions. For sure, it will be interesting to see their thought process for why diapers/pull-ups are being avoided. That would be quite the conspiracy. For sure, there are lots of ways Maddy could play things with the pills to show that they aren't a good idea (apart from making sure the bedwetting continues despite taking them). We'll get more info on the pills later (there's a doctor's appointment scheduled now). But as far as the expiration date of the pills, you have to recall that Grace was still using them up through early high school as an insurance policy when away from home. And the Mom did clear it with Maddy's pediatrician, so it's safe to assume that it's OK in this instance (meds can have a shelf life of up to five years, and that's not a true expiration anyways, that's just how long the FDA has tested) It's clear that the medicine still works, as it is making it more difficult for Maddy to pee so it is stopping urine production as intended. We'll have to see what may or may not happen with the side effects.

Chapter 15: A Hard Pill to Swallow I stumbled through the front door after being dropped off by the bus on Thursday afternoon. I let my backpack fall to the floor with a loud bang as soon as I had shut the front door behind me. I was exhausted. It had been another seven hours of struggling to stay awake and focused through what had seemed to be an endless day of end-of-year exams. The only relief was that I was finished with taking my last test for this school year. Now I had about a week of bliss before my end-of-year grades became available online. Yes, I still had to go into school tomorrow, but that was just to wrap things up, clean out lockers, and have end-of-year pizza parties. I’d be free from homework, studying, tests, and early morning bus rides for the next three months. Now, all I wanted to do was sleep. Grace wasn’t anywhere to be seen. But I knew my older sister was home because the minivan she drove had been in the driveway when the school bus had dropped me off. I didn’t get what she did while she was shut away in her room all the time. I took advantage of her absence to drink a glass of water in the kitchen. But with my recently discovered sports water bottle – tucked away in the deepest recesses of the bottom drawer of my dresser – sneaking around to stay hydrated enough to make myself wet the bed wasn’t going to be an issue ever again. Angie and Emma had grilled me about the sleepover again during the ride home from school. That was annoying because I’d already told them yesterday that Mom had said she needed to think about the proposed all-nighter on my birthday a little over a week from now. I was hoping to get an answer about that from her tonight. Neither of my friends were coming over after school. Angie was busy tonight with preparations for the vacation her family was heading out for as soon as school was out tomorrow. I would have had Emma over this evening, except that she had somewhere to be with her family. I quickly cleaned the glass I’d gotten a drink from and then dried it off before putting it back in the sink, leaving no evidence behind. Once in the living room, I kicked off my shoes and collapsed onto the couch. <><><> I woke up to Grace furiously shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes and looked up. She was standing over me with a panicked look on her face. “Leave me alone,” I mumbled, rolling over to not be facing my sister. “I was just taking a nap.” “What in the world are you thinking?” Grace said, her voice sounding rather agitated. “What do you think? I was taking a nap ’cause I was tired.” “And how do you think Mom would feel about you peeing all over the couch? That’s a lot harder to clean up than your mattress?” I turned back over to look up at Grace. “I wouldn’t do that during a nap.” “Well, that’s what I thought once, too. Just go to your bedroom if you want to sleep.” I yawned and looked at my phone. It was about twenty minutes since I had arrived home from school, but I felt a lot better even after that quick nap. “I think I’m fine, now.” That did raise another interesting question. Was it common for bedwetters to have accidents if they fell asleep for a brief nap during the day? And then there was another thought, one I would have to consider later. If being a bedwetter meant sometimes having an accident during a nap, that could create an excuse for me to experiment with peeing my pants more during the day. “Actually, since you are awake,” Grace said. “You should probably get the cat litter taken care of before Mom gets home. It was really stinky when I was putting clothes in the washing machine before you got home. And you can get your laundry out of the dryer while you're down there because I’m going to need to use it soon for my stuff.” It didn’t matter that Grace was saving me a potential lecture from my parents about not doing my chores. It still was annoying that she was telling me to do it. I stomped noisily down the stairs on the way to the basement. This evening couldn’t come quickly enough. <><><> Mom had apparently talked through the proposal for the all-nighter with Dad, and neither of them was enthusiastic about it. “It’s simply too risky, Maddy,” Mom said. She was sitting next to Dad on the couch. It was just me and my parents in the living room. Jackson was playing with Legos in his bedroom. Grace was off in the kitchen with her after-dinner chore of washing the dishes. “What if you fall asleep on the couch or on the floor by accident? I’m sure you don’t want to have a bedwetting accident around your friends.” I tried to get them to see my side, to no avail. “But that is why we’ll have a bunch of energy drinks. There’s no way I’m going to fall asleep.” “Maddy,” Dad said. “I don’t think you realize how much more caffeine is in those drinks. Even one drink could have four to five times as much caffeine as a can of pop.” “What’s this about energy drinks?” Grace asked as she walked into the living room. There was a splatter of wet spots across her shirt from when she had been washing dishes. “Maddy wants to do an all-nighter for a sleepover on her birthday to avoid the issues she’s been having at night. I was explaining that having a bunch of energy to stay awake the whole night isn’t going to be a good idea.” “There is absolutely no way I would want to deal with three girls all drugged up on caffeine and who knows what else in energy drinks,” Grace said. “Seriously, Maddy. You get shakes just when you have more than one glass of Mountain Dew.” “But,” I said, trying to protest. “It’s not going to work,” Mom said. “An all-nighter is simply not a good idea.” But this left me in a bind. If I couldn’t have a sleepover, what was I supposed to say to my friends? “But I can’t tell Angie and Emma that I can’t do any more sleepovers.” “I don’t think you’ll have to,” Mom said. “There’s something else we can do – something we did with your sister – to make it so you can have a sleepover, so long as it is a normal one without energy drinks.” Pull-ups. Please let it be pull-ups. Perhaps the advertisement in the magazine had been enough to remind Mom of what she may have done for my sister. “Guys,” Grace whined. “Do you have to keep mentioning my own bedwetting?” “It’s just to help your sister out,” Dad said. “We learned a lot about how to handle it with you, so of course, we’re going to try some of the same things with your sister.” “When your sister was around ten years old,” Mom said, “our pediatrician, Dr. Mathorn, recommended trying a pill that would make it so she wouldn’t wet the bed, and it worked quite well.” Seriously? It was as though my parents were doing everything possible to avoid the solution that seemed most obvious to me. But why did it take so long to get Grace the solution that apparently solved all her problems? “Why didn’t she have Grace take those pills earlier?” “I think she said it wasn’t as effective with younger kids and that bedwetting was fairly normal for younger, elementary-age kids, so there wasn’t any need to be concerned about it. We had Grace take the pill whenever she wasn’t going to be at home. It was very effective, so long as she also made sure to limit fluid intake and use the toilet before bed.” Grace groaned softly off to the side. Her hands were covering her face. Obviously, this wasn’t a memory she wanted to be forced to re-live in front of her younger sister. Mom continued her explanation. “Even after her bedwetting phased out, we will had her take the pill for sleepovers for the next couple of years, just as an insurance measure. We still have some, so we figured we’d have you try them the next few nights. Assuming they work as well for you as they did for Grace, then you’ll be able to have the sleepover without any issues. “You really kept those pills?” Grace asked incredulously. “I mean, it wasn’t really intentional. We didn’t think it was likely you’d need them again. They just got tucked away at the back of the medicine cabinet and were forgotten about. It’s probably about time to take them tonight. I’m going to go grab them now.” Mom left to get the pills. Dad excused himself to go off and get Jackson started on his own bedtime routine, leaving me alone with Grace for the moment. My older sister still looked a little irked that Mom had kept her bedwetting medication long after that issue had stopped. For all the ways my parents had allowed my older sister to be independent, bedwetting hadn’t been one of them, not when she had also been forced to continue to sleep on the waterproof mattress until a couple of nights ago. I turned to Grace. “Was there a reason you didn’t take the pills every night?” “I never slept well, and I often had really bad headaches afterward for the next day. It made school impossible.” “Is that supposed to make me want to take them?” “I mean, they do work. I never wet the bed once after taking them. And a terrible headache in the morning beats being known as the girl who still wets the bed at school. But there wasn’t any way I was going to take them every night; that would have been way too much.” “But, like, how does it work?” “I’m trying to remember exactly how the doctor put it,” Grace said. “Basically, it makes it so your body doesn’t produce as much urine while you sleep so that your bladder doesn’t fill up so quickly and make you need to pee.” This revelation about the bedwetting pills was another nail in the coffin to the idea that my older sister had ever worn pull-ups to manage her nighttime condition. I was fairly certain at this point that Grace had never worn pull-ups at home, not with how frequently the laundry was being done when she had been a bedwetter. And the pills meant that she wouldn’t have needed a pull-up any time she had been sleeping overnight somewhere else after she had turned ten. Still, if she had started using the pills around when she was ten, there would have been a time before that when her bedwetting would have to have been managed somehow when she wasn’t at home. I tried to think back to the trips we had taken, but I would have been a baby for nearly all of them, so I didn’t have the slightest recollection of what would have happened with my sister’s bedwetting. Had pull-ups perhaps been used only for those occasions? Or had we picked places to stay that had given my parents the ability to do the necessary amount of extra laundry that would have been required? I’d held off on asking further questions about my sister’s bedwetting because I hadn’t been able to think of a way to ask about pull-ups that would work. I couldn’t have her thinking that I was at all interested in wearing them. But this new revelation gave me an opening to ask a question that could lead to the same answer without revealing exactly what information I was seeking. “So, like, what did you do on trips before you had the bedwetting pills?” I felt quite proud of myself for how sneakily discreet the question was. Without even mentioning pull-ups, there was the possibility that she could give an answer on the subject. “Why does it matter?” “I don’t know. I just realized that I’d never noticed you wet the bed before.” Grace glared at me. Before my sister could say anything further, Mom arrived and answered the question for her. “Oh, we used a special, disposable, absorbent bedwetting pad on top of the mattress.” “Mom, did you have to tell her that?” “What? We’ve already discussed other stuff from your bedwetting.” “It sucked,” Grace said. “It was like sleeping on a massive puppy pee pad. It crinkled worse than my mattress. I could hardly sleep.” “Well, it did at least keep the bed dry while we were at hotels or staying with relatives,” Mom said. “Though it would have been pretty wasteful to use it at home when we had the ability to just toss everything in the washing machine easily.” I finally noticed that Mom was holding a glass with a couple of ounces of water in it. “We should give the pill a try tonight. We need to know if it is going to work before we can OK the sleepover,” Mom said. “Are you sure it is fine to use without talking to a doctor?” Grace asked. “Of course not,” Mom said. “I gave Dr. Mathorn a call this morning, and she gave the OK to have Maddy try the pills this weekend, and depending on how that goes, we can figure out the next steps during her appointment on Monday.” Mom had already signed me up to go to the doctor? My brain started to get fuzzy at the thought of being poked and prodded in an uncannily sterile room. “But… but…” “Dr. Mathorn helped us a bunch with your sister’s bedwetting. It’s not as though she is unfamiliar with the topic.” Mom handed me the pill and the glass of water. “I know you don’t like taking pills. But this one is nice and small, so let’s just get it over with.” I recalled that if I had been an actual bedwetter, I would have been eager about this new solution. I forced what I thought was a natural happy face as I tucked the pill under my tongue and rinsed it down with a swig of water. This was going to be a major problem. “And this is really important, Maddy,” Mom said. “Grace’s doctor was very clear that once the pill is taken right away before bed, you aren’t to have any liquids until the morning. He said that is necessary to avoid some other harmful side effects.” That sucked. I had only gotten half of the way through my water bottle full of disgusting tap water tonight. And the way Mom had phrased this request made it clear that disobeying it would be unwise. I assured Mom that I would avoid drinking any more water and excused myself to head back to my bedroom. I needed time to think through what I was supposed to do next. There were a number of things that I wanted. I wanted pull-ups to wear. I wanted to continue peeing myself. I wanted my parents to think I was a bedwetter. I wanted to have the sleepover with my friends. I wanted to keep the bedwetting a secret from them. I wanted Mom to think that the new bedwetting pills she was giving me were ineffective. I couldn’t think of a path forward that would allow me to accomplish all of that. There was no way I could stop wetting the bed, even temporarily, not when that would convince Mom that the pills were the solution to that problem. But if the bedwetting continued, there wasn’t any way Mom and Dad would sign off on a sleepover. Succeeding in convincing them that I was a bedwetter would only result in them stopping sleepovers unless I could somehow get them to consider pull-ups as a solution. At least with the latest information about my sister’s bedwetting, I was able to understand how she had avoided being made to wear pull-ups. My parents had found a way to handle her nighttime condition in a way that mostly worked without needing disposable undergarments, though in my opinion a pull-up would have worked better than a disposable, absorbent sheet on top of a mattress. Did they not know pull-ups were an option? Had Grace simply outright refused to wear them? Or perhaps they just considered it too expensive or wasteful compared to washing sheets every night? But the exact reason didn’t really seem to matter. What seemed clear to me was that there was no way my parents were going to get me pull-ups of their own volition. I realized now that unless something changed before the sleepover, I was going to need to do the unthinkable. I was going to have to directly ask my parents to purchase pull-ups for me. <><><> A few hours later, I found myself lying awake under the covers. I’d gotten better at staying up past my parents’ bedtime without feeling tired. I had been trying to pee for the past thirty minutes, but it was no use. I didn’t have the slightest urge to urinate. That little pill had worked extremely well. I should have at least felt a decent need to pee at this point, as I’d managed to drink half the bottle before Mom had instructed me very sternly to not have any more water. It was so not fair. The only thing that cheered me up was that it shouldn’t take more than three or four days to convince Mom that these pills weren’t worth the effort. I set an early alarm on my phone, putting in a single earbud so that I’d be the only person to hear the alarm in the morning. No matter how good the pill was, I’d surely have a need to pee in another six hours. I would let Mom wake me up to discover a wet bed again. And in a few days, with every other solution having failed, perhaps it would be possible to convince them that pull-ups were a palatable option. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

There is certainly no question that she is going to get pull-ups, but yes, we aren't quite to that point just yet, outside of the flashback to her first pull-up experience. I think it is safe to say the water bottle is tucked out of sight in her room. Had to have a way to put some limitations on her (having a dad in IT who is careful with where his kids go on the internet), especially with how thorough she has been in trying to get information about pull-ups and diapers. If it weren't for her concerns about being caught looking it up, she certainly would have been eager to look up information which I would rather not have her knowing at this point in the story. Yeah, I was online (I hope secretly) as early as 11 and finding all kinds of stuff, but that changes the dynamic for Maddy too much. I think it's a more interesting story with her having more limited information, at least in this stage of her explorations.

Something like that, lol. That's the danger of posting around midnight and getting a little mixed up on what the date is. I think things will be a little awkward when the report card arrives. Not sure how much gets tied to the bedwetting, it's pretty clear that Maddy hasn't ever been that good of a student in the first place. There are a number of reasons a doctor hasn't been involved yet. It's important to remember that not much time has passed in the story. Maddy first wets the bed early Saturday morning. The last chapter ends Wednesday evening, meaning it's been less than a week since the first bedwetting accident happened. And they would have viewed the first couple of accidents as a random fluke occurrence. Also, this is in the U.S., doctor's appointments aren't something that can easily be set up the next day, especially for something that, while concerning, is in any way an emergency. And this finals week for Maddy. It wouldn't make any sense for her parents to hold her out of school and cause her to miss her exams to go to a doctor's appointment that could be much more easily scheduled for when school is out. Plus, one of the parents will need to arrange time off of work themselves to get her to a doctor as well. Finally, the parents are familiar with bedwetting from their own experience and their experience with Grace; the initial steps they are taking, limiting liquids and making sure she goes to the toilet before bed, are some pieces of advice that would be given anyway at a doctor's appointment. I think it is fair to say that the parents are quite knowledgeable about bedwetting.

Chapter 14: Let It All Soak In I couldn’t fully blame my lack of sleep for how distracted I was from the standardized test I was taking. I suppressed yet another yawn as I tried to recall all the advice Grace had given me about multiple-choice tests. There was the obvious – when in doubt, choose “C.” Then, there were other pieces of advice, such as working to eliminate wrong answers to make it easier when I still needed to guess. On the geometry question I was staring at, I was fairly certain that “C” was incorrect, and I was skeptical of “D” as well. That’s what made the whole thing suck even more. If I just had more time to work things through on a sheet of paper, perhaps I’d arrive at the answer, but I had a little over a minute for each question, meaning I had to just mark an answer and move on to the next one or risk not completely finishing the test. I took hold of my pencil and filled in the “B” circle. At least I had narrowed that question down to having a fifty percent chance of getting it right. Nine months of learning all boiled down to two days of filling in circles for hours and hours on end. I hated that this was supposed to somehow serve as proof that I had managed to learn anything over the course of the school year. Then again, it wasn’t as though my performance throughout the rest of the school year could have been regarded as spectacular. If I had considered how tired the bedwetting was going to make me, I might have been able to exercise enough self-control to delay this experiment until after the school year had ended, but now I was stuck with the consequences of those decisions. Still, I should have been able to do better on the test. It was true that I was tired. It was also true that I had gotten significantly less sleep than normal since Friday evening. But it wasn’t even lunchtime yet. Even on nights when I didn’t get that much sleep, I usually was capable of summoning the willpower to stay on task for the first couple hours of school. That wasn’t the case today. That’s because something else was on my mind. Something that challenged everything I had thought I had known about my pursuit of pull-ups over the past few years. Despite my best efforts, my thoughts kept attempting to drift back to that scene in bed earlier this morning when I had peed in my pajamas while lying down on the bed. I had finally succeeded in coaxing my body to allow my bladder to release in a more natural sleeping position. The result had been a rush of exhilarating physical sensations and emotions that had taken me completely by surprise, especially as that hadn’t been the case the two other times I had peed while kneeling over my sheets. There were a couple of things I knew were true about my interest in pull-ups. There was something about the overall presence and feeling of wearing a pull-up that I found comforting, from the way the sides hugged around my waist to the softness of the interior absorbent padding to the way the bulky padding fit between my legs. I could still recall the mesmerizing way the pull-up had crinkled as I had held it in my hands and slid it up my legs. It had brought a sense of calm and assurance that shouldn’t have been possible for just a change in undergarments. I had always assumed that I would wet a pull-up when I got a chance to wear one next. That was what one did when they wore a pull-up. I had no idea whether that was something I was going to enjoy, but I was desperate to discover what it felt like. With the way my wetting experiment had gone this morning, I felt it was safe to assume that this was something I was going to enjoy. What I had never expected was that I would now be desperately wanting to wet my pants again, not because doing so was part of a scheme to get my parents to purchase pull-ups for me, but because I enjoyed doing it in and of itself. I looked up at the clock near the doorway to the classroom. How long had I been staring blankly at the next question? Five minutes. I hurried through the new few questions, skimming them briefly before hastily filling in my first guess. Grace had told me a horror story about college prep tests where one would actually lose points if they got an answer wrong, meaning that guessing was risky business, as it was better for your grade to leave a question blank than to be incorrect. At least that wasn’t the case with this test. I took a deep breath. I was still on track to finish the test on time. Just had to stay focused, remind myself that I would have all summer to experiment with these new desires. There were only twenty minutes left before it would be time to break for lunch. I managed to get through three more questions before I once again succumbed to my daydreams, drawn in by other questions that I felt more strongly compelled to answer. There were so many things I wanted to know now. What would it feel like to wet my wants while I was standing, with the urine trickling down my legs and onto the floor? What about when sitting down on a chair, where it would cause my bottom to get soaked rather than my front? The best part of all was that I didn’t need any special undergarments to explore any of these newly desired experiences. But none of this meant that my longing for pull-ups was, in any way, lessened. I hadn’t thought that it would be possible for my desire for pull-ups to grow any more intense than it had already done in the past three years. But the revelation that I enjoyed peeing myself meant that there was even more to look forward to when I finally got the pull-ups. But in the meantime, I was eagerly looking forward to when I would be alone in bed this evening, and I was already working out ways I could circumvent my family’s attempts to limit my hydration. <><><> The worst part about the standardized tests was that they were done in long sections. They made us sit at our desks for seventy-minute test sections. That was far too long to be sitting on an uncomfortable wood desk. Angie and Emma weren’t even in the same room for me for the testing, not that it mattered, as we wouldn’t have had any chance to communicate, anyway. I joined my friends at a table in the cafeteria. Angie was already halfway through her lunch, and Emma had gotten a few bites into hers. “Took you long enough,” Angie said as I took a seat across the table from her. “I was done fifteen minutes early.” My face burned. I had used up every last second, filling in circles right up until the moment we were directed to immediately set our pencils down. I hadn’t done well at all. The worst of it was I’d left a handful of questions unanswered at the end. “What did your mom say about the sleepover?” Emma asked between bites of her ham and cheese sandwich. I had put off asking Mom about the sleepover. I had still been working on the best way to convince her that an all-nighter would not only be OK, but would be a good way to circumvent her concerns about bedwetting. I gave an excuse that, under most circumstances, would have been the honest truth. “Uh, I forgot.” Emma tilted her head back and rolled her eyes. “Seriously, Maddy, do I need to like text you a reminder to make sure you do it?” <><><> The copy of Reader’s Digest was still on the entryway table when I got home from school. Mom probably hadn’t had time yet to take a look at it before she went off to work. I left it untouched. I’d just have to wait for her to read it after dinner. Grace was already home. Mom and Dad still didn’t allow me to have the house to myself for more than five to ten minutes at a time. That had been different with Grace. By the time she was turning thirteen, they had not only entrusted her to stay alone by herself, but they had allowed her to be home with Jackson and me. I, on the other hand, apparently still required constant supervision. It would likely be another year or two before they finally moved on from that time when I had accidentally left the stovetop burners on. I had the next few evenings planned out for if, when, and how I was going to continue the bedwetting. Tonight, Wednesday night, I was going to wet the bed for real again, but do it in the middle of the night, rather than early in the morning. On Thursday, I would give the bedwetting a break, figuring that the occasional dry night would make the rest of the wet nights appear more natural. On Friday night, or really Saturday morning, I would again wet the bed for real once I woke up in the morning. Tonight was the trickiest, with all of my family members save Jackson paying close attention to my hydration and bathroom habits. My phone buzzed. Emma had just texted me a reminder to ask Mom about the sleepover. I texted back to inform her that Mom was at work and that I would be asking her after dinner. I headed off to the restroom at the urging of my bladder. I tugged down my pants to the disappointing sight of my underwear. Using the toilet had never felt so completely unsatisfying as it did right now. If only I could be going potty in my pants instead. As I sat on the toilet, I tried to make sense of why this new desire had appeared. I’d struggled throughout the day to understand the why of what had happened earlier. Was this tied to my desire to wear the pull-up again? Was it something altogether different, a new spark? <><><> Mom made me wait thirty minutes after dinner before she finally picked up the Reader’s Digest magazine. I hadn’t been able to witness the moment of truth, so I was left to guess whether the pull-up ad had caught her gaze when she had first grabbed the magazine. She looked up from the magazine as I walked into the living room. “Can I ask you a question?” “Sure, what do you need?” “My friends were wanting to do a sleepover for my birthday party.” “Maddy,” Mom said. “Are we really sure that is a good idea right now?” At least Mom had the courtesy not to mention bedwetting, as Jackson was still in the room. “They suggested that we could pull an all-nighter. So, that way there won’t be any issues since I won’t be falling asleep until we leave.” Mom frowned. “I’m going to need to talk with your father about that.” That wasn’t usually a promising sign, as Mom tended to be more lenient than Dad when it came to giving me permission to do new things. However, the fact that I hadn’t gotten an outright no was at least encouraging. My biggest problem would be trying to explain to my friends why I suddenly wasn’t allowed to have sleepovers anymore if my parents were to reject the all-nighter plan and not offer pull-ups as a solution. I texted Emma to let her know that I had asked Mom and that I hadn’t gotten an immediate decision. Now, it was time to put my plan to get hydrated for tonight into motion. I went upstairs to my bedroom and scoured through my closet, digging through boxes of old soccer equipment until I came across exactly what I was looking for. It was a water bottle I had been given at a camp a year or two back, one of the annoying ones with one of those spouts that almost made it feel as though I was drinking out of a toddler sippy cup. With the rest of my soccer cups in the cupboard downstairs – Mom had insisted they be thoroughly washed with the soccer season over – this was the perfect find, as no one would have a clue that I was using it. I waited until Gace had started her evening task of washing dishes. Yes, I could have done this while she was secluded in her bedroom, but I wasn’t going to take the slight risk of her coming out at an inopportune time and catching me in the process of filling up the bottle. It was a twenty-four-ounce bottle. More than enough to get sufficiently hydrated to allow me to easily pee. A few minutes later, it was full of yucky tap water from the upstairs bedroom, but it wouldn’t make any difference. My body would work to convert it to urine just the same as if it had been fancy filtered water. In the end, it all came out the same way. <><><> I squirmed underneath the covers as the clock moved ever closer to midnight. This was partly due to the physical need to urinate. I had downed the whole water bottle in the hour before I had gotten ready for bed. But it was also in anticipation of what I was about to do. In my head, I kept replaying the moment I had wet the bed last night. Thirty minutes to midnight. The sounds now coming from the bedroom told me that Mom and Dad were in the final stages of getting ready for bed. They always fell asleep quickly. There wasn’t any reason I couldn’t wet myself now rather than wait until midnight. It wasn’t as though I was going to want to get up and get cleaned up right away. I wanted time to savor the moment I had been looking forward to all day long, let it all soak in. I made a short and futile attempt to pee while lying on my back, but that was completely hopeless. It didn’t even feel as though I’d come close to getting my bladder to release. That changed when I rolled over to my stomach, the mattress loudly protesting beneath me as I did so. I didn’t bother with any more experimentation. I knew now what worked, so I followed the same exact routine. I slid my hands under my chest, raising myself up ever so slightly off of the mattress. My bladder emptied at the slightest urging. I dropped down onto the mattress the moment I began to pee. The urine was streaming out of me so fast I could hear the sound of it as it came out. I hadn’t noticed how I’d been holding my breath. I breathed out slowly as my bladder emptied. The expectations that had built up throughout the course of the day were more than exceeded. This was even better than last night, as the amount of water I had chugged before going to bed meant that I peed a lot longer. My sheets were soaked all the way past my knees. The mental exhilaration of peeing myself like an actual bedwetter combined with the physical sensation of the intense warmth from the urine left me in a state of euphoria. There was no sense of shame or embarrassment. It felt so good. It couldn’t possibly be wrong. My only regret was that it had taken me three years to realize that this was an option. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

Thanks, and that's why i like having the flashback chapters as well, showing how much of a buildup there has been to this point. Thanks, I've never come across one that old in real life, just scene those older ads on the internet. It's been a while since I've watched that movie. Trying ti think of what scene you're referring to. And yes, Maddy would be quite mad at that.

Chapter 13: It Feels Good I winced as I pulled the blaring earbud out of my ear. The left side of my head ached terribly. Perhaps that was the result of sleeping with an earbud all night long. Or maybe that was because of how unexpectedly loud my alarm had sounded when it had gone off like that. With my earbuds now laying harmlessly on the bed, the blaring alarm coming from them was only barely audible. It certainly wasn’t anywhere near loud enough to be heard from outside of my bedroom. I was almost stunned that my plan to wake up early had actually worked. And, with my alarm tied to my earbuds, I hadn’t woken up my family either. I yawned several times. It was another early morning for me. But, unlike when Chester had woken me up early yesterday, this time, it had at least been intentional. That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to feel the effects of less sleep, though. I had another long day of end-of-year tests, which I wasn’t looking forward to in the least. Well, it wasn’t so much the tests that I wasn’t looking forward to, but what my report card would be saying when my parents checked my grades online later. The hard part was over, at least. I was awake. I had plenty of time until I was actually supposed to be up for school. All I had to do now was to wet the bed intentionally. The one good thing was that I did need to pee. It didn’t matter that I’d had less to drink yesterday or that I’d used the toilet right before getting into bed. A nearly full night of sleep was still enough for my bladder to fill up again. The need to go wasn’t super urgent. I likely wouldn’t have had an issue with going back to sleep and waiting to use the toilet when getting up for school at a normal time. I remained under my covers as I rolled over to lie flat on my stomach. The noise of the bed crinkling beneath me served as a reminder of last night’s conversation with my parents and the mattress swap afterward. For a few brief, wonderful moments last night, I had thought that I had managed to convince my parents to get pull-ups, but for whatever reason, they seemed to think this was a better way to manage my bedwetting, at least for now. I had to remind myself that I had only begun the bedwetting plan on Friday evening, and it was now Wednesday morning. Not even a week had passed. I had to admit that it wasn’t reasonable to expect pull-ups that quickly. This new mattress had come as a complete surprise. That didn’t mean there weren’t some obvious benefits to the waterproof mattress. I wouldn’t have to work so hard to clean things up after an accident. No need to go and grab paper towels, cleaning sprays, and baking soda. I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about possibly ruining my mattress. It also meant that it wouldn’t matter if the accident wasn’t cleaned up immediately. There wouldn’t be any worries about the urine soaking into the mattress, to the point of being impossible to get rid of the smell and stains. I suspected that it wouldn’t be likely that I’d be able to fall back to sleep afterward, but I could at least feign sleep until Mom came to wake me up. I wasn’t looking forward to her seeing the result of the bedwetting – I had at least avoided having her witness my wet pajamas since that first fake bedwetting accident on Friday evening. I had to make sure the accident looked natural. It was one thing for Mom or Grace to see my wet bed in the middle of the night, when they were probably groggy and their faculties may not be fully working. It was something else in the bright morning light. The easiest way to do that would be to actually pee myself while lying down this time, rather than while lying down in bed, but to do that, I would need to get past whatever mental block had been making it difficult for me to urinate while my bottom wasn’t hovering over a toilet. I still had plenty of time. There were another forty minutes until I was supposed to be up. And, if I pretended that I had slept past my alarm, that probably gave me another five to ten minutes past that before Mom would come in and check on me. I rotated through a couple of different mental exercises as I attempted to convince my bladder that it was OK to pee. I tried thinking about rain, rivers, and dripping faucets, but unlike the two nights when I had been kneeling over the bed, that wasn’t enough, though I did feel my bladder getting closer to the point of release. Next, I tried to picture myself seated on the toilet, thinking about the sensation of sitting on the cold plastic toilet seat, but I didn’t think my bladder found that mental image to be all that convincing while I was lying on my stomach. I strained my muscles as much as I could. I came so close, but it still wasn’t enough to get the floodgates to open. Ten minutes had already passed by. I knew that in the worst-case scenario I would simply emulate how I had wet the bed those first to nights, but I wanted more than anything to do it the right way for once. There was more to that desire than wanting to make sure my mom was convinced it was a legitimate bedwetting accident. I wanted to know what it felt like to wet the bed. Perhaps the problem was with how I was lying on my stomach, with how my bladder was pressed up against the bed. But instead of sitting up completely, I slid my arms under my chest so that my waist was just an inch or two off of my sheets. It was a small difference, but it proved to be exactly what I needed. I put all my concentration into getting my bladder to release, and a minute later, I began to pee. The warm urine quickly began to stream through my underwear and cotton shorts. A few seconds later, I lowered myself back onto the bed as my bladder continued to empty. Like the other two times I had peed the bed, once I had started, there was no stopping it, not even after adjusting into a position where I had previously not been able to get my bladder to release. It was a vastly different experience to wet myself while lying down rather than doing it while kneeling over my bed. My shorts and even my shirt got significantly wetter as the urine pooled beneath me. This is where the difference of having a waterproof mattress became clear. As the urine wasn’t able to soak into the mattress, that meant it instead soaked further and further through my sheets and pajamas, in a large wet spot with my waist at the epicenter. When I finally stopped peeing another twenty seconds later, I was wet all the way from my knees to the middle of my chest. My previous attempts at wetting the bed had felt a bit awkward and embarrassing. This was different. My heart was racing, but not from being afraid. There was a sense of exhilaration. Why was that? Was it because I had wet myself in a more realistic way? It certainly felt more real to pee while lying down than to do it how I had done it before. The sensation of laying in urine-soaked pajamas and sheets should have been off-putting, but it wasn’t. The warm sensation surrounding me felt comforting in a way I couldn’t explain. I laid as still as I possibly could under the sheets. I was left to ponder how it would feel when all of that warmth and wetness was instead contained by the pull-up. <><><> “Maddy. Maddy. It’s time to wake up.” My eyes flickered open and then shut right away again. I was in bed, but something felt really off. I turned my head to the sound of Mom’s voice. Everything beneath me was damp and clammy. The exhilaration of the bedwetting incident had faded away along with the warmth. Given Mom’s calm reaction so far, the urine must not have soaked upwards through my sheets or cover. From her vantage point, everything must have appeared dry. “At least you made it through the night,” Mom said. “I suppose we didn’t need the new mattress tonight after all, but still, it will be good to have it as a precaution until we’re sure this bedwetting phase is over.” There was no escaping from Mom finding out about the bedwetting. I mean, she had to find out, but what was the best way to do it? I didn’t want to be forced to tell her about it, but the alternative, throwing off my covers and revealing just exactly how big of a mess I’d made in bed, was embarrassing as well. I resisted her request to get out of bed and pulled the cover tighter over my body. “Just a few more minutes.” “Madelyn, seriously, you’re going to miss the bus if you don’t get your bottom out of bed right now.” “But Mom…” I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence, to admit having wet the bed. Mom’s expression shifted as she walked back toward the bed. “Is something wrong?” “Um.” What else was I supposed to say? But it didn’t really matter. I was sure my face was giving away how embarrassed I was feeling again. Mom reached down and gave my cover and sheets a gentle tug that was enough to reveal the reality of what lay beneath them. “Oh, Maddy.” Mom sighed as she looked down at me. I looked away from Mom, down at the massive wet patch beneath me. It was even bigger than I had imagined in my head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know it happened until you woke me up.” “It’s alright,” Mom said. “Let’s just focus on getting you ready for school.” I slid gingerly out of bed. I decided that as much as I liked the immediate aftermath of wetting myself in bed, I didn’t care as much for how things felt once everything cooled off. Mom gave me a careful hug, making sure to not press up against the wet spots on my pajamas. “I’ll take care of getting everything cleaned up. Just toss your wet pajamas on the bed and head to the shower.” Mom retreated to the hallway, shutting the bedroom door behind her and giving me some momentary privacy to get undressed. I stripped out of my wet clothes and tossed them on the bed. How many more nights and mornings like this was it going to take? <><><> By the time I was dressed and out of the shower, all my bedding had been stripped and taken to the laundry room. The light-blue mattress was a strange look in the middle of my bedroom. There wasn’t anyway but to admit that it was an effective method for handling bedwetting. Nothing further was said about the bedwetting incident. Mom handed me a cup of yogurt for breakfast. From the kitchen, I could hear the washing machine running down in the basement. If Grace or Jackson had noticed all the laundry Mom had taken downstairs, neither of them made any mention of it, either. I finished off the small can of yogurt in record speed and then grabbed my backpack and headed toward the front door to wait for the bus. I would be able to see it coming off in the distance, so there wasn’t any need to leave the house until it was in sight. There was a pile of mail near the front door that had been brought in last night that hadn’t been yet been sorted. On top of it was another copy of Reader’s Digest. Recently, there was a new ad for the bedwetting pull-ups about every other issue. I had assumed that Mom must have seen the advertisement at some point or another. I wasn’t as sure that she had ever used these pull-ups with my sister, but I had hoped that all the advertising would have given her the idea that this could be an option to use with me. But maybe she just skimmed past the ad without looking at the finer details. The size range for the pull-ups was in small print, after all. There had to be something I could do to get her to take a closer look at the advertisement without letting her know that I was behind it. With the bus seemingly running a few minutes behind schedule, an idea came up for something I could put into motion before I headed off to school. Everyone else was still in the kitchen. The bus wasn’t in sight yet. My affinity for the magazine was already well known by my parents. Since they viewed it as educational, it wouldn’t stand out as suspicious if they came across me reading through it. I leaned back against the wall as quickly skimmed through the magazine. To my good luck, the ad for the bedwetting pull-ups appeared smack in the middle of the magazine. But how could I make sure it got Mom’s attention this time? A few ideas floated in my head. I could slightly crinkle the edges of a few pages – the pull-up ad included – so that when Mom was skimming through the magazine, she would be more likely to stop on it. But that didn’t feel like enough to actually get her attention. I could leave the magazine open to this page, but face down. On the opposite page was the start of a story I could plausibly be interested in. But would that be too much? I thought I could pass it off as believable. And I could always feign some initial discomfort at the idea of pull-ups when my parents did bring it up as an option. I pretended to read the magazine, though really all I was doing was taking in the image of the pull-up on the page, reading through all the features — five-layer protection, double leg barriers, the ability to absorb three cups of liquid. That last bit of information seemed most relevant to my case. I had peed a lot in each of the bedwetting accidents, but certainly not much. It gave me hope that the pull-ups would work for me when the time to wear them finally arrived. A minute later, I caught sight of the yellow bus off in the distance. I hastily set the magazine face down on the table, hoping that it would at last catch Mom’s attention when she opened it up later. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

Writing a story that involves an abusive parent doesn't mean that the writer or readers condone abuse. All stories require conflict. That conflict often comes from the antagonist engaging in unethical, immoral, or illegal behavior, usually to the detriment of the protagonist. Portraying a villain doing villainous things doesn't mean that the author or readers support that behavior in any way. The point of the story isn't to cheer on the villain; it is to see how the protagonist survives and overcomes that challenge and how it shapes and affects their life. And yes, there is a satisfaction to seeing the villain get what is coming to them in the end. If someone creates a story about a serial killer or a rapist, they aren't condoning murder or rape, and the people consuming that media aren't doing so because they find murder and rape to be acceptable behavior. These stories don't normally that behavior. And likewise, if an author writes an ABDL story that contains abusive parents, that doesn't mean they are condoning the abuse, or that the people reading it are reading it because they like child abuse. (The one caveat I would add would be that a story that does portray abuse as acceptable/good/normal would be problematic, there isn't any question about that.) I completely understand why someone with your background would be personally uncomfortable reading about that topic, I wanted to provide an explanation for why these types of stories can be OK to write/read. And that is why stories about traumatic experiences can be important, because they can allow people who haven't had that experience to better understand and empathize with people who have. To give an example, I recently watched a really well-done TV mini-series "A Nearly Normal Family." The series begins with a deeply uncomfortable scene where a teen girl is assaulted by her coach at a sports camp. The story gives a very detailed look at how this has impacted her life and the importance of being able to listen to and support survivors of assault. As a guy, these are situations or experiences I'm not ever going to have, but there is an importance to being able to better understand the challenges women still face in society.

That would certainly make things pretty wild. I know. If they were normal ABDL-story parents, she'd have what she wants already and then some. There's lots of things for her to try, but she went to bed with the plan to wake up early to wet it before school, so we'll have to see how that plays out first. That's possible, also possible that it could result in adjusting summer plans. But that's still over a month away, so they're going to have to figure out things in the meantime. And there's also that sleepover/allnighter that Maddy's friends want to have on her birthday.

Thanks, like seeing the theories, though I'll need to stay mum on how those may go. That is an interesting theory. We will definitely be learning more about her parent's experiences with bedwetting and how that impacts their decision making (along with more info about how Grace's bedwetting was handled). Maddy's parents are making it easy for her to get pull-ups, that's for sure. But it would be hard for her to confess that she has any interest in them. As for the title, we'll just have to see how things play out. There's a long way to go with the story. It's been 12 chapters so far and we've only covered a Friday afternoon to a Tuesday evening.

Chapter 12: A New Solution I woke up with a bunch of fur in my face. I let out a loud sneeze as I shoved our orange cat off of me. Chester trotted halfway to my now open bedroom door – he must have snuck in while I was sleeping – and then looked back and made a chirpy meow at me. Yes, yes, I get it, cat. You’re hungry. There was no choice but to get up and feed him. Not unless I wanted him bothering me until it was time to get up and get ready for school. My digital clock still said there was an hour-and-a-half left until it was time to get up for the day. I could probably even squeeze in another ten minute of sleep if I waited until Mom came to wake me up. I looked down at my pajamas as I got out of the sleeping bag. There was a clear and obvious problem. These were the same ones I had worn to bed last night. I had forgotten to toss them in the laundry with my bedding last night. I took a deep breath. That was a close call. If Mom had caught me in these pajamas, it would have raised questions I’d be unable to provide a satisfactory answer for. I changed into a new pair of pajamas and headed downstairs with my old ones. There wasn’t a need for the flashlight app on my phone as the first rays of sunlight were coming through the windows. I walked as quietly as I could. Chester trotted alongside me, chirping noisily. At least I’d have a good excuse for being up if anyone was awake when I was returning to my bedroom. I filled up Chester’s food and water bowls in the laundry room. They hadn’t even been fully empty. The stupid cat couldn’t be satisfied with eating out of a bowl that was only half-way full. Now I needed to deal with my pajamas. I turned on the faucet in the sink next to the washing machine and held my pajamas under the water until they were soaked. I twisted them in my hands to wring out all the excess water and then stuffed the pajamas in with the still very damp bedding in the washing machine. There, now, when Mom moved the laundry over to the dryer, nothing would seem out of place. <><><> A yawn escaped me at the start of math class. Mr. Thompson was going around handing back our final homework assignment of the year before we got started on our final exam. It had taken me about an hour to fall back to sleep after putting my pajamas in the washing machine. At that point, I’d only gotten another thirty minutes of sleep before Mom woke me up for school. From the look on her face, this most recent fake bedwetting incident had completely caught her by surprise. I suppose she had thought all the preventative measures she’d made me take would have been enough to bring the bedwetting to an end. Mom had taken care of vacuuming up the baking soda on the mattress and moving the laundry from the washing machine to the dryer. As far as I was able to tell, she hadn’t caught on to the fact that I had faked the bedwetting accident simply by tossing my bedding and pajamas in the washing machine. Mr. Thompson handed the algebra homework paper to me as he passed by my desk. I stared at it in disbelief. The letter “C” was circled in red at the top right corner. I skimmed through the questions. Several of them had been marked as incorrect with red dashes through them. That was a complete betrayal. It was totally unfair. I had held up to my end of the bargain in keeping Grace’s secret, and she hadn’t even bothered to deliver me a good grade. There was no way these questions had been too difficult for my older sister. I tucked the assignment angrily into my backpack. I was going to have a word with Grace after school. The next set of papers our teacher handed out was even less fun than the first. Our final exam for the math class was fifty questions long and would account for twenty-five percent of the grade for the year. It was hard enough to do math when I was fully awake, but I was exhausted from the lack of sleep over the past several days. All the numbers and symbols seemed to dance around in front of me as I tried to work my way through each question. It didn’t help that I’d already had to sit through five different tests today, with each one seeming to go worse than the one preceding it. It was no use. I gave up about halfway through, beginning to fill in the little multiple-choice circles with my pencils with my best guess after reading through the question once. At least if I finished earlier, I could find somewhere to sit and rest outside in the hallway. <><><> I struggled to pretend that the way my parents were limiting my liquids didn’t annoy me. But it wasn’t fair. Mom had made fresh-squeezed lemonade to go with our dinner of hotdogs fresh off of the backyard grill, and I had been given a much smaller portion of lemonade than I would have preferred. Even Jackson had as much as me, and Mom was as careful with monitoring his sugar intake as she had been when I was his age. But the amount I had to drink tonight was irrelevant. I intended to instead wet the bed closer to when I was about to get up in the morning, so long as I could figure out a way to be awake at least a decent time before needing to get up for school. No amount of restrictions on how much I was allowed to drink would change the fact that I would need to pee when I woke up in the morning. I wasn’t sure of all the specifics of the plan. I would simply need to improvise when the time came. I watched as Grace quickly finished her meal, excusing herself from the table and heading off toward her bedroom. I hadn’t managed to corner her yet. She still owed me an explanation for the poor grade she had gotten me on the Algebra homework. I finished my hotdog in a large final bite and washed it down with the remainder of my pitiful serving of lemonade. It was time to confront my sister. I retrieved the mangled homework paper from my backpack in my bedroom, straightening it out before walking up to my sister’s bedroom door. I knocked on Grace’s door. No response. I knocked again, a bit louder. “I’m coming,” Grace said. “Yes, I know I need to still do the dishes.” A few seconds later, her bedroom door cracked open a few inches. “Oh, it’s you?” Grace said. “I’m busy.” I shoved the homework paper in her face before she could shut the door on me. Grace nudged it aside with her hand. “What are you so upset about?” Grace asked nonchalantly. “I got a ‘C’ on the assignment. You were supposed to help me get all the questions correct.” Grace rolled her eyes. “Let me let you in on a secret of cheating on homework. Never get a score that would make your teacher suspicious. If you had turned in an assignment that had every single answer correct, that would raise a lot of questions. I doubt you’ve gotten an ‘A’ on any assignment in the class this year, and to do so on an especially difficult one would make it look really obvious that you didn’t do the work yourself.” “Oh.” I hadn’t considered that at all. “If I hadn’t helped, you probably would have gotten a zero on it,” Grace said. “So, you still came out well ahead. Now, if you don’t mind, I have things to do.” Grace stepped back and shut the door in my face. I was left to wonder how she was so knowledgeable about cheating on homework. <><><> “Maddy, your dad and I need to talk with you about something.” I could feel my heart begin to speed up. That phrase was never the harbinger of good news. I looked up at Mom from where I was sitting on the couch with my phone. She was standing near the entrance to the living room. There was a serious look on her face, but it differed from the more annoyed expression that she wore when I was in trouble for something. Jackson was oblivious to Mom’s request. He was sprawled out on the carpet in front of the couch, playing Minecraft on a tablet. Thankfully, Grace was nowhere to be seen. She was secluded upstairs again in her bedroom after having come down briefly to wash dishes in the kitchen. What could I have possibly done wrong? The list of options was longer than I would have liked. It had to be something more than just forgetting my chores. I would just be sent off to do them right away if that were the case. The one thing that didn’t worry me was my end-of-year grades. They weren’t looking to be that good, but Mom and Dad wouldn’t be getting hold of them for at least a week or more. That could be dealt with later. But there was the Algebra quiz. Had Mr. Thompson decided something was off after all and told my parents about it? Or had one of my friends blabbed about how Grace had left us on our own at the mall? Either of those would have me spending a sizable amount of time grounded at the start of summer break. But as bad as either of those two outcomes might be, there were even worse possibilities to consider. What if they’d caught on to how I had been faking the bedwetting? If they questioned me about whether it was real, would I be able to lie effectively, or would I crumble under the pressure of that interrogation? “Maddy, come on,” Mom said, giving her head a slight shake in the direction of the hallway. I stepped carefully over my brother as I walked in a straight line toward the hallway. Regardless of what I was going to be disciplined for, I had a pretty good idea of how it was going to go down. Unlike either of my friends, I had never been on the receiving end of a spanking. That didn’t mean that my parents’ disciplinary methods were ever enjoyable. In fact, there were a number of times when I think I would have rather endured a spanking than be forced to be grounded from electronics for a week. As I followed Mom down the hallway, I was mentally bracing myself for the long lecture I was about to get, followed by being grounded from whatever my parents thought would best convince me to behave better in the future. There wasn’t a specific location in the house where these conversations normally took place; it was always somewhere away from my siblings, so they couldn’t eavesdrop on the conversation. I followed Mom to the entrance room, where Dad was already sitting on the right side of a small couch. Dad patted the middle of the couch. “Why don’t you have a seat, Maddy.” That was different from normal. Aside from the fact that these lectures usually began before being given a chance to sit down, there was the realization that neither of my parents had used my full name. That made me even more confused. So, I wasn’t in trouble? I took a seat next to Dad, and then Mom squeezed in beside me to my left. There was barely enough room for us on the couch, which was probably only meant for two occupants. I kept my mouth shut. Better to wait and see what exactly my parents were up to than guess and be wrong. “We need to have a talk about what’s been happening at night,” Mom said. “About how we’re going to need to handle the bedwetting.” There it was. I tried to get myself into the right mindset for this conversation. I had to talk as though the bedwetting was surprising and upsetting, that I wanted nothing more than for it to come to an end. And, if possible, I needed to find a way to discreetly steer the conversation toward the possibility of getting pull-ups without revealing how badly I wanted those specific undergarments. “It is kind of our fault, in a way,” Dad said. “And mine,” Mom added. I looked back and forth between my parents. How in the world could it be their fault that I was wetting the bed? “I read that if both parents had a history of wetting the bed as kids, then it meant their own kids have a three-in-four chance of being bedwetters themselves,” Dad explained. Fractions always gave me a hard time. I tried to picture it in my head the way that my elementary math teacher had explained long ago. Leave it to Dad to turn bedwetting into a math problem. “What that means,” Mom said, “is that since your father and I both were bedwetters when we were kids, that means that it was very likely that our own kids would have issues with that as well. We thought we’d dodged a bullet with you and Jackson, but I guess not.” Wait. What? I conjured images of Mom and Dad as kids, drawing on old family photo albums I had gone through before. The idea of either of them waking up in the middle of the night to wet sheets was too much. I started to laugh. “No way.” I looked back and forth at Mom and Dad again. Sitting sandwiched between them was making this conversation more difficult than necessary. “For real?” “I think I wet the bed nearly every night until I was nine or so,” Mom said. “I remember I wasn’t allowed to go on any sleepovers until I stopped. It lasted a bit longer for you, honey?” “Yes,” Dad muttered. I’d never seen him look so flustered. “Bedwetting didn’t stop for me until I turned fourteen. My siblings weren’t as, um, understanding about it as they should have been.” “The point we’re trying to say, Maddy,” Mom said, “is that bedwetting isn’t a big deal. It isn’t your fault or anything you need to be embarrassed about. It’s something that lots of other kids have to deal with. I don’t think this bedwetting phase should last all that long, but we’ll be with you to help you get through it, no matter how long it takes.” “And if you have any questions or anything you want to tell us,” Dad said. “I promise we won’t judge you for it. We went through the same things as you.” If only I was bold enough to take Dad up on that offer. There was a question I wanted to ask really badly. Had either of my parents worn diapers or pull-ups to bed? Had there even bed ones available in their size that long ago? But I had to work to hold myself back from asking about it. No kid my age was going to proactively seek out information about diapers. I had to remember that I was supposed to be feeling embarrassed and concerned about the situation. “I just don’t get why it started all of a sudden.” “I don’t know either,” Mom said. “We’ll worry about that if it keeps up. For now, I think we’re just going to focus on making things a bit easier to clean up if the bedwetting happens again. We are going to need to do something to make sure that your mattress doesn’t get ruined. Cleaning it up afterward is OK for the occasional accident, but not if you are peeing on it almost every night.” I focused all my thoughts on keeping a straight face. This was it. This was when they would tell me that they had purchased the pull-ups so that the mattress wouldn’t be getting wet every night. I could hardly believe my luck. I would be getting pull-ups after wetting the bed only three times in four days. “We’re going to switch your mattress for the one that Grace has on her bed,” Dad said. “It has a waterproof covering, which makes it a lot easier to clean up after bedwetting accidents.” That was not what I wanted. There was no hiding the look of disappointment on my face. But it improved my subterfuge, as Mom and Dad took it to be a sign that I was embarrassed by needing a special mattress. Mom began to rub my back. “I’m sure this bedwetting phase will run its course quickly enough, but until then, won’t it be a lot nice to not have to worry about cleaning the mattress in the middle of the night? You could swap the bedding out and go back to sleeping in bed rather than on the floor in a sleeping bag.” “I guess.” Mom had a solid point. It would be nice not to have to spray cleaning solutions and then dry off the mattress with paper towels and sprinkle baking soda all over it. Faking the bedwetting would take a lot less work on my part. “We better get that done before it’s time for bed. Why don’t we get that taken care of now?” Dad said. I followed my parents up the stairs and to my bedroom. My room was a bit of a mess. I had some dirty clothes tossed on the floor that should have been put in the laundry hamper, there was a pile of unfolded laundry on my bed that I had been supposed to get put away before dinner, and then there was the fact that I hadn’t made the bed either like I was supposed to. I had just tossed the clean sheets and covers haphazardly across the mattress. Mom examined the scene with a sigh. “We’ll talk about the state of your bedroom later. Why don’t you get everything off of the mattress and set it to the side while we talk with your sister about the mattress swap?” They left me to it, shutting the door behind them as they walked over to my sister’s bedroom. I picked up the dirty laundry and tossed it into the hamper in the closet, then went to tackle the mess that was my bed. After tossing everything unceremoniously on the floor, I heard some raised voices from out in the hallway. I tiptoed over to my door and placed my ear right up against it. “You’ve been asking for a new mattress for a long time,” Dad said. “Yeah, and you always told me that you weren’t quite ready to trust me with one yet,” Grace said. Did that mean what I thought it meant? Grace had supposedly stopped wetting the bed when she was twelve. “Seriously, it was only like once or twice a year at that point. Besides, it hasn’t happened for like two years now.” That probably wasn’t without any close calls, though. The time Grace had caught me in the hallway a few nights ago, she had been in quite the hurry to go use the toilet herself. “Exactly,” Mom said. “So now is the perfect time to do the swap because of how your sister has been wetting the bed a lot the past few days.” “That’s gross, Mom. I don’t want Maddy’s mattress. Not after she’s peed all over it.” “Hey,” Mom said. “It got cleaned up right away each time. There aren’t any visible stains, and it doesn’t even smell funny at all. Besides, it’s not like the mattress you are giving her hasn’t been peed on several hundred times.” “Yeah, but it has a plastic cover. It cleans off without a trace.” “Look, we’re doing the mattress swap. I’m sure Maddy will be done with the bedwetting soon. When that happens. She’ll have her old mattress back, and we’ll buy a new one for you.” “Ugh, fine,” Grace said. “I’ll get the sheets off.” I heard my sister’s bedroom door shut rather loudly. I retreated to standing back near my bed lest my parents returned to my bedroom to catch me eavesdropping. Mom opened my bedroom door a few seconds later. “Are you all set, Maddy?” “Yeah.” “Good; why don’t you help me get your mattress off of the bed frame?” The mattress wasn’t as heavy as I had expected it to be, but it was still a bit of work to lift it up and set it against the wall. Dad and Grace entered the bedroom a minute later, carrying a strange mattress. It wasn’t a normal looking white mattress, like mine, and it also didn’t have a fabric exterior. It instead had a light blue vinyl exterior. It looked more like something that would be seen in a hospital than a bedroom. The new mattress fit onto the bedframe perfectly, which was the benefit of us both having queen-sized beds. From how Grace was looking at my mattress, I could tell that she was trying to determine if there were any visible urine stains on it. I didn’t know why Grace had thrown such a fuss in the hallway. It seemed that she was getting the better deal out of this. She finally had a normal, comfortable mattress to sleep on. “Well, that’s set,” Mom said. “Why don’t you get your bed made, Maddy, we’ll leave you to it.” Dad and Grace grabbed my mattress while Mom went ahead and held the door open all the way so they could maneuver it out into the hallway and toward Grace’s bedroom. Mom shut the door behind her, leaving me by myself. Once all the sheets and covers were back on, my bed didn’t look any different. At first glance, there wouldn’t be any way to tell that something was off. The changed the moment I laid down on it, as it crinkled loudly, reminiscent of that time three years ago when I had snooped through my sister’s bedroom. Even shifting my weight ever so slightly caused more plastic crinkling sounds. There was no question that it was a downgrade from my other mattress. It likely was going to take a while to get used to sleeping in it. Still, it couldn’t be argued that this was going to beat sleeping on the floor. I tried to lie as still as I could, just to get a moment of silence. It wasn’t the pull-ups I had been hoping for. It was progress. Mom and Dad were now taking the bedwetting seriously, but was it progress in the right direction? Had this been their sole solution for my sister’s bedwetting? What if they had never once purchased pull-ups for her? What if my parents didn’t care that my sheets and bedding got soaked with urine every night so long as the mattress was protected? Could that be the reason I had never noticed Grace wearing a pull-up before bed? Was this why I hadn’t been able to find any evidence of pull-ups since that time I had searched her bedroom? Had my parents deliberately decided not to get her pull-ups, or perhaps had they not even realized that it was an option? My sister had been potty trained around the same age as me, meaning she would have been about two when she was dry during the day. She didn’t stop regularly wetting the bed until she was twelve. Had she really gone through ten straight years of waking up to wet pajamas every night? Ten straight years of needing to change sheets and bedding in the dark, first with her parents’ help and then on her own? That sounded absolutely awful. And that still left the question about what had happened on that vacation to my grandparents’ place six years ago. Grace had wet the bed that first night. And there had been no further evidence of accidents after that. Had six-year-old me simply not been all that observant? Or had something else been going on at the time? I hadn’t even considered the possibility of different types of mattresses. I realized that there was still a lot about bedwetting that I didn’t know. I checked my phone. It was about time to get ready for bed again. I went to brush my teeth and use the toilet. There was nothing to do but keep pressing forward with my plan. My parents still seemed to think that the bedwetting would end soon. Perhaps if it didn’t, they might start to look at solutions other than the waterproof mattress. I set the alarm on my phone for forty-five minutes before I was supposed to be up for school. It wouldn’t do any good to have it wake anyone else in the house. But I had the perfect solution in mind. As I laid back down on my now super crinkly bed, I plugged a pair of headphones into my phone. I tucked one of them into my right ear, making sure to lay down in a way that wouldn’t cause me to dislodge the headphones while I was asleep. I would pee in the bed when I woke up early and allow Mom to discover me sleeping in a wet bed when she came to get me up for school. I needed to make the bedwetting as inconvenient as possible. I had to get to a point where my parents would realize that pull-ups would make managing it so much easier. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

Daydreaming is normal, but obsessive, compulsive, excessive daydreaming, which distracts from and gets in the way of real-world responsibilities, isn't normal, and can be a sign of ADHD or other neurodivergence. Obviously, that in and of itself wouldn't be enough for a diagnosis. A therapist would want to see a lot of other behavior patterns. Well, at least with this last chapter, Maddy is 9 years old since it is a flashback from three years ago. I think Maddy is aware enough that her interest in diapers isn't normal and wouldn't be considered acceptable that she is going to keep it to herself. Yep, but remember as well that this was how Grace's bed was three years ago, when Grace was 15 and Maddy was 9. Oh, there shouldn't be any question that she is better at this point. It wouldn't be out of the question for the mom to have a few things to try before pull-ups and diapers come into consideration.

Chapter 11: My Sister’s Room Three years earlier I had never liked road trips. That much time spent cramped in a tiny space was too much. My body would tell me that I needed to move, and then I couldn’t. But what made the drive home from the funeral take even longer was this new idea that I had become obsessed with. I needed more than anything to wear a pull-up again. All I could think of as the miles passed by were schemes about how I could manage to get my hands on one. “Mommy, I need to pee.” Ahead of me in the front row, my three-year-old brother was squirming desperately in his car seat. Grace and I had retreated to the back row of the van for the return journey home, mostly to give us some space from our annoying younger brother. “Mommy,” Jackson whined again, his voice reaching a painfully high pitch. Grace and I exchanged a glance. This scene with my brother had been a frequent occurrence on this road trip. “The next rest stop is in five miles,” Mom replied. As if that made any sense to a three-year-old. How was Jackson supposed to know how long that was going to take? “But Mommy,” he whined as the squirming continued. It was hard to know how serious of an alert it was from him. Despite all the whining for potty breaks on this road trip, my younger brother hadn’t wet his pants at all. He had been potty trained for a little over a year now. Mom and Dad had gotten to work on it right away after his second birthday. My parents had tossed out all of Jackson’s diapers and made him run around naked outside for a couple of days that summer. I didn’t understand how that was supposed to help with toilet training, but it had worked, even if the process had grossed out Grace and me a bit. That Jackson was fully potty trained was unfortunate. If Jackson hadn’t been potty trained yet, or had perhaps been a bedwetter like his cousins, that would have been another potential source of pull-ups. I couldn’t recall what methods my parents had used to potty train me. But I hoped that was not how it had gone. “Should have made him wear a pull-up for the trip,” Grace muttered softly next to me, making sure her voice wasn’t loud enough for Jackson to notice. Wouldn’t that have been nice? That would have solved my issue of getting a pullup. I tried my best to ignore my brother’s whining for the next five minutes. Having a now-potty-trained three-year-old on a road trip at least meant that we were making a bunch of stops. I’d get a chance to run around at the next rest area. Perhaps it would even have a half-way-decent playground to explore. Like previously, we made it to the rest area without Jackson wetting his pants. As soon as Dad shifted the gear into park, Mom hurried to get Jackson unbuckled and out of his car seat. The rest of us followed behind at a much more leisurely pace as Dad then took Jackson off to the men’s restroom. Mom would insist that Grace and I make a stop at the restroom as well, even if I protested that I didn’t need to go at all. I did manage to pee a little, but only just a little, before heading out behind the rest stop building to check out the playground. The play area was a bit sad, designed more for toddlers than kids my age. The top of the lone slide was only slightly taller than me. The only good thing was that it had a two-person swing set. I pushed off to get myself started as my thoughts drifted back to my plans to acquire a pull-up. Even though Mom and Dad had previously assured me that Grace’s bedwetting days were long past over – otherwise, I don’t think I previously would have agreed to share a bed with her at a hotel – I had nevertheless attempted to ascertain whether she was perhaps secretly wearing pull-ups under her pajamas. I hadn’t dared try to check while she was asleep, but when we were getting out of bed, I laid on my side to watch my fifteen-year-old sister slide off of the mattress onto the floor. The brief glimpse under her short nightgown told me that she was wearing regular, big-girl underwear. A disappointing result, but not all that surprising. The question that lingered the most in the back of my head was whether my sister had worn pull-ups during her years as a bedwetter. Grace obviously hadn’t been wearing a pull-up that night. I had stumbled across the aftermath of her wetting the bed. But I couldn’t take that as proof that she had never worn a pull-up before. Could Mom’s annoyance at her that night have been because she hadn’t been wearing one when she should have been? “You want me to give you a push?” Grace asked as she joined me out on the playground. “Sure.” She took hold of me and pulled me back super far. I hung on for dear life as I swung forward, my back nearly parallel to the ground. Grace took a seat on the swing next to me and pushed herself off as well, though she didn’t go quite as high in the air as me. Mom tended to hang on to all of our old clothes. In the back and upper shelves of the two closets in my bedroom were boxes and stacks of old clothing. Perhaps Mom had been saving them for if Jackson had turned out to be a girl, and she had never had the time to toss them out afterward. Or perhaps there was still the possibility of another baby joining the family. There were a number of options I had thought about for getting a pull-up. But one of them stood out above all the rest. I was going to search my sister’s bedroom at the next possible opportunity. <><><> A couple of weeks passed before the perfect opportunity came up. It was Friday evening in the summer, and Grace was having a sleepover with some of her friends. Normally, that would have been a perfect opportunity to have Angie and Emma over, but their families had other plans this weekend, so I was left all to myself. Usually, that would have sucked. But this night, I planned to make the most of the opportunity. My parents had hurried me off to bed a little earlier than normal. There was a TV show they wanted to watch, and apparently, I wasn’t old enough to be allowed to watch it yet. I had gone through all the motions of getting ready for bed except brushing my teeth. I didn’t like brushing my teeth. And tonight, Mom and Dad were too busy with their show to check on me as I hurriedly got ready for bed. Now, I was in my pajamas, standing at the end of the hallway in front of Grace’s bedroom door. Jackson was sound asleep. My parents’ TV show had begun a few minutes ago; I had crept halfway down the stairs to make sure I could hear it playing in the distance. Grace was out of the house. There would be no one to bother me as I explored my older sister’s bedroom. Grace didn’t have the stereotypical “keep out” sign on her door. But it wasn’t necessary. Her room had always been off limits to me and Jackson. In fairness, the same rule applied to Grace for my bedroom, not that my older sister had any interest in entering it. I reached my hand out tentatively to touch the handle, turning the doorknob and pushing in the door. I took two cautious steps into her bedroom and shut the door behind me. I was standing on forbidden ground. Our bedrooms couldn’t be more unalike. Grace had posters of bands and other artwork on the walls. In the corner was a fancy desktop computer, the kind with a glass side that lets you see all the components. If Grace had worn pull-ups, and they hadn’t been thrown away, where would they be? I opened each of her dresser drawers, sifting through them carefully. No pull-ups, only regular underwear. But that made sense; the pull-ups wouldn’t have stayed in the dresser. Why would she want to see a reminder of her bedwetting every time she went to get dressed? If the pull-ups were in her bedroom, they would be where Mom had tucked away the rest of my sister’s old things. I slid open one of the closet doors. There were a bunch of boxes on the top shelf, but they were completely out of reach for me. I grabbed the chair in front of Grace’s computer desk and dragged it over to the closet. Even standing up on it barely allowed me to reach up and touch the boxes on the top shelf. I pulled a cardboard box down and set it on Grace’s bed. I didn’t find any pull-ups inside the box once I undid the cardboard flaps on top. But I did get a glimpse of some of the hand-me-downs that might be coming my way in a couple of years. There were a bunch of old shirts and sweaters in the box that I remembered my sister wearing a couple of years ago. That meant they would be mine – if I wanted them – in a couple of years. Every year or so, Mom would bring some of Grace’s old clothes to my bedroom and have me sort through which ones I wanted to have for myself. Mom didn’t make me keep anything I didn’t like, which was a relief, as our styles could be quite different at times. But there were no pull-ups in this box. But that was OK. There were still six more boxes to check in this closet and then a whole other closet to look through afterward. I checked the time on the digital clock next to my sister’s bed. I still had another thirty minutes to go before I needed to be back in bed, in case my parents came upstairs immediately after their show was over. The searches of the next five boxes proved to be as fruitless as the first. Not a single pull-up in sight. I returned all the boxes to the closet. Time to check the next one. Another ten minutes passed by, and my disappointment grew as the mundane contents of each box were revealed. That was followed by a cursory search of my sister’s nightstand drawers and some drawers at her desk, but that, too, was fruitless. It wasn’t fair. I had gotten my hopes up so much over the last few weeks. I was so sure that I’d find some pull-ups. I was so eager to see what the girl’s version of them would look like. There was, of course, always the chance to search my brother’s bedroom as well. But, to the best of my knowledge, my parents had never once bought pull-ups for him. He had gone straight from diapers to superhero-themed underwear. Fitting into his pull-ups might have been a stretch. I couldn’t imagine a baby diaper fitting me. But I would still try to find a way to search his bedroom at some point, even if it was a disappointing plan “B.” With my plan defeated, I walked over to Grace’s queen-sized bed. I still had another ten minutes to spare before I needed to be out of her room. I sat down on Grace’s bed next to a few of the boxes I hadn’t yet put back onto the closet shelves. My bottom didn’t sink into the mattress like it did when I sat down in my own bed, and the motion of sitting on the bed was accompanied by some loud crinkles. That was really strange. I patted my hand firmly on the sheets. Definitely firmer than my own bed. And it was still making that weird crinkling sound. I laid back on the bed. Not comfortable at all. How did my sister manage to fall asleep on this every night? I got up from the uncomfortable bed. I wouldn’t have wanted to lie down on it for any longer than necessary. I admitted defeat in my search for pull-ups. May as well get back to my bedroom early. I nearly dropped the last box as I put it back into place on the closet shelf. After doing one last check to make sure I had put everything back into place, I left Grace’s bedroom and headed to my own bed, sad that I hadn’t found any pull-ups, but happy that I had a much nicer mattress to sleep on than my sister. I was going to have to get used to disappointment. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

I've been very intentional about including those scenes for Maddy and just the general way she's been written as well. She certainly isn't intended to be neurotypical. There are a number of reasons for that, but that's for later in the story. And yes, I imagine there might be a Harry Potter reference or two in the story at some point.

There certainly could be. Will have to see if Maddy realizes that before anyone else does. I'm sure that is something Maddy has considered as well, especially since she has decided to have more variety with her fake bedwetting accidents. Thanks!

Chapter 10: Change of Plans I fell asleep last night without pretending to wet the bed. But that was OK. I’d come to the conclusion that I was going to need to adjust my approach to bedwetting if I wanted to convince my family that the bedwetting was real and not going away anytime soon. I was supposed to set an alarm on my phone before going to bed on a school night so that I would get up in time to get on the bus, but I rarely remembered to do so. That meant that instead of a buzzing sound from my phone, I was rudely awakened by Mom knocking on the bedroom door. “Madelyn, I’m not going to say it again. You need to start getting ready for school right away.” There were a couple more knocks on the door, followed by a longer pause. I opened my eyes long enough to take a look at the digital clock in the room. It was fifteen minutes past when I should have gotten up to get in the shower. For the first time in three mornings, I had woken up in my bed rather than in a sleeping bag on the floor. I closed my eyes again. I was too exhausted to even want to sit up in bed. There was a reason Mom and Dad never let me stay up past midnight on a school night. These late nights were absolutely killing me. The door creaked open and then clicked shut. I heard Mom’s footsteps as she approached the bed, but I kept my eyes closed. Just let me have a few more seconds of rest. Pretty please. Mom sighed and rubbed her hand against my shoulder. “You really need to get up now, Maddy, or you’re not going to have time to eat breakfast before catching the bus.” That would have been fine with me. I didn’t care to eat breakfast most mornings now if I could avoid doing so. But Mom and Dad usually insisted that I get something to eat before going to school. Sometimes, when I was running late, they’d just hand me an orange or a banana, which would often get passed off to one of my friends. Mom rubbed my shoulder again. I opened my eyes. There was no use putting it off any longer. I glanced up at Mom. “Looks like someone slept a lot better last night,” she said. I didn’t agree. I opened my mouth in a wide yawn. “But I’m so tired.” “But your bed stayed dry, right?” Mom asked in a whisper that was unnecessary with the door closed. Oh, that’s what she was referring to. I rolled my eyes, attempting to be the perfect caricature of a soon-to-be teenager, annoyed that her mother would even dare ask that kind of question. “Of course it did.” “That’s good,” Mom said, though she did take one more glance down at my midsection as she said so. “I think as long as you don’t drink too much and remember to use the toilet before bed, we shouldn’t have any repeats.” I nodded in agreement. I could let her think she had won, for now. With Mom now convinced that I was awake, she left the bedroom, leaving me to hurry through my morning routine. I tossed the covers off and went to select an outfit for the day to have something to change into in the bathroom once I was done showering. I grabbed a pair of black leggings and a light-blue T-shirt that had three ducks in a row on it – two yellow ones and one gray one. I was much more awake the moment I stepped into the shower. My change of plans had been the result of several realizations, ones that were even clearer after having a night to sleep on it. The first realization was that I couldn’t just keep doing the same bedwetting routine night after night. It was fine to try to do the most normal type of bedwetting for the first couple of nights of faking the bedwetting, but I was going to need to risk mixing things up. Wetting the bed in the same way at the same time, night after night, would eventually appear unusual if I were to be following an exact pattern. The second realization was that it was OK to have a few random nights where I didn’t wet the bed at all. I seemed to recall from the conversation three years ago with my bedwetting cousins that they hadn’t wet the bed every night, either. I didn’t know how things had been for Grace, but perhaps her experience had been similar. The third realization was that I was going to need to follow all of my parents’ rules about limiting my liquids and using the toilet before bed. It was becoming apparent that pull-ups would likely be a measure of last resort, so I had to make it appear as though every other attempt at stopping the bedwetting was unsuccessful. If they were to catch me drinking too much water, they would blame it on that rather than considering other solutions. I decided that, at least for this last night, I would let Mom, Dad, and Grace think that they’d won, that their efforts to curtail my liquids and ensure that I used the toilet before bed had been enough to bring this recent spate of bedwetting to a halt. I would prove them wrong tonight. It would involve a little more risk, but I didn’t have any other choice. There were several knocks on the bathroom door, followed by the sound of Dad’s voice, which was barely noticeable with the shower still running. “Maddy, you already were up late. You don’t have time for a long shower.” That snapped me out of daydreaming about my new plans for faking bedwetting tonight. I rushed to finish cleaning myself up. By the time I had finished showering and dressing, the bus was set to arrive in less than five minutes. Jackson had already gotten on his bus for elementary school, and Grace was driving to school, so she was still lazily picking through her breakfast while staring at her phone. If the high school hadn’t been in the opposite direction from our house as the middle school, my parents might have had Grace drop me off on her way to high school, but even though I hated how long the bus ride was – and needing to get up extra early for it – the one nice thing was that it gave me time to spend with Emma and Angie before classes began. And besides, the school year was nearly over. Just one more week. Just a bunch of final exams and standardized tests to wade through, and then I’d be free for the whole summer. And there wouldn’t be any actual tests this morning. Monday was prep day, which meant teachers in each of our classes were doing final reviews before it would be time to take our final exams and other end-of-year tests. Not that it mattered much. Even if, by some miracle, I were to ace all of my tests, it wouldn’t bring my grades up to where my parents wanted them to be. That was the downside of having a really smart older sister. Grace had just had to go first and set a bunch of academic expectations that I wasn’t capable of meeting. “Sleep well last night?” Grace asked as I sipped on a glass of orange juice that Mom had hastily poured for me. This time, I caught on to the fact that my sister was really asking about the bedwetting, not whether or not I had gotten a good night’s worth of sleep. “Yeah,” I replied, avoiding eye contact with her. “Maddy,” Mom called out from the front room. “Your bus is at the other end of the street.” I picked up my backpack and rushed to the front door. Mom placed a banana in my hand, which I knew right away was going to be given to Emma. <><><> Both Emma and Angie had already turned thirteen during the school year. I was a late bloomer. I wasn’t going to officially be a teenager for a couple of weeks. My two friends didn’t hold their status as official teenagers over me. Well, at least not that much. Emma accepted the banana from me as I took a seat next to her on the bus. That was good because I wasn’t all that hungry, and it would have been wasteful to just toss it out. I spent the first portion of the bus ride describing the soccer camp my parents had signed me up for in great detail. “Yes, yes, we get it. You’re going to have a fun time without us,” Angie said, after I had been rambling on the topic for about ten minutes. I shut up at the realization that I had indeed been talking nonstop since I had sat down next to Angie and Emma. “If you can stop being a chatterbox for a few seconds, we can start making some other plans for the summer,” Emma said. The conversation turned to getting together for a sleepover. That was dangerous territory. I needed to get my hands on pull-ups before then so that Mom would feel comfortable sending me on the sleepover. I, of course, wouldn’t even take them out of my backpack, but Mom wouldn’t need to be aware of that. The one good thing was that Angie’s parents were taking her on a road trip for a week right after school was let out. That would push off the first sleepover long enough that my parents should be getting me pull-ups after having run out of other ideas to treat the bedwetting. “We could do the sleepover on your birthday,” Emma suggested. She turned to Angie. “You’ll be back by then, right?” Angie took a look at a calendar on her phone. “Yep, we get back the day before.” “I was thinking,” Emma said. “That we should do something special for it. How about pulling an all nighter?” “No way, I’d be out of it by 2 a.m. at the latest,” Angie said. Emma looked over at me. “Well, birthday girl?” That was perfect. Even if I didn’t have pull-ups by then, I could convince Mom I’d be fine until after my friends left to go sleep things off for the rest of the day at home. “That sounds like fun,” I said. “I can do it as long as I can have enough caffeine.” “OK,” Angie said, giving me a look. “Now I really know that it is a bad idea. No way should you be allowed to have that much caffeine.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. Emma joined with Angie in staring incredulously at me. “Let’s see,” Emma said. “There was that time in second grade when you had pop during the pizza party at school. Do I need to remind you what happened afterward?” I blushed. I was very grateful that Emma hadn’t spelled out what had happened in that embarrassing incident. “That was ages ago,” I protested. “Besides, our teacher should have known that my parents didn’t let me have any caffeinated drinks when I was that young.” “Well, what about that time Allen tricked you into drinking that energy drink last year?” I groaned loudly. “That wasn’t my fault, either. How was I supposed to know that Starbucks’ lemonade was caffeinated?” “I’m not saying it was your fault, just that maybe caffeine and you don’t mix very well,” Angie said. “You practically had the shakes, and you literally couldn’t shut up for hours. Mr. Gainwell had to send you to the nurse’s office until you could calm down.” “That’s still different,” I protested. “I’ll be thirteen. I’ll be fine as long as I pace myself and no one surprises me with drinks secretly spiked with caffeine.” “Fine, but we’re doing the sleepover at your house then,” Angie said. “Your parents can deal with you if you get too hyper.” I agreed that this was a fair deal, though it might take some convincing for my parents to go along with it. <><><> I followed all my parents’ rules about limiting my liquids to the letter after I got home from school. I made sure to not drink too much, and I made sure that they could see that I was only filling my cup halfway up the few times I did have something to drink this afternoon and evening. I didn’t get any further comments about limiting my liquids. I didn’t think that was because my parents weren’t paying attention, but because I’d given them no opportunity to complain, as I was following the directions without needing to be given any reminders. Mom did end up reminding me to go and use the toilet before getting into bed, but I would have done so even if she hadn’t said anything to me. The hardest part tonight was having to wait until I was certain that everyone was asleep. As the clock again passed midnight, I once again found that I had no need to pee at the moment, which wasn’t a surprise for tonight. But that didn’t matter. The situation tonight was perfect. I’d done everything my parents had wanted me to do in order to avoid wetting the bed, so when I would trick them into thinking I had wet the bed anyway, despite all of those precautions, they would have no choice but to look for other solutions. The plan tonight was simple, and there was only a tiny risk of being caught at the wrong time, so I figured I could pull it off. I would do what I had considered doing the night before, but only this time, I would do it without wetting my bed in the first place. I eased myself out of bed, turning on the lamp on the nightstand to let me see what I was doing. I removed all the bedding into a pile on the floor. It was a lot to carry all at once, but it would be a lot less risky if I did it all in one trip. I went to open my bedroom door first, as I’d not be able to easily grab the handle with my hands full. The only point where things could go wrong would be right now. I’d only be in the hallway for a couple of seconds, but if Grace were to come out of her bedroom and notice that none of the bedding I was holding was wet, that would out my plan then and there. But it only took a few seconds to walk down the hallway, even while trying to do so quietly with a massive bundle of laundry in my arms. Soon, I was on the stairs and out of sight, letting me slow down lest I trip over Chester in the dark. I deposited the bedding in the washing machine, added some detergent for good measure, and got the washing cycle started. There wouldn’t be any way to tell that I hadn’t actually peed the bed. It would just look like I had been responsible for taking care of the cleanup myself without waking Mom and Dad. And there wouldn’t even be any need to say something to Mom directly. She would be sure to come across the full washing machine at some point after I had left for school. I remembered to sprinkle baking soda on the bed before getting tucked into the sleeping bag on the floor. My only regret as I was drifting off to sleep was how much it was going to suck having to take a bunch of tests tomorrow while being extra tired. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

We'll see. Certainly something that Maddy will need to be aware of. I mean, I think the story is good, but I'm not quite sure it's that good, but thanks! Thanks! Yep, it is fun writing a family from that perspective, especially in this scenario where their support may be making it more difficult for Maddy to get what she wants. Yep, but that will come with practice. For now, she's only able to do it if she is needing to go pretty badly (which creates a problem when she isn't able to hydrate enough or is forced to use the toilet right before going to bed)

Chapter 9: Running Dry Mom’s eyes went back and forth between the sleeping bag on the floor and the uncovered mattress still covered in baking soda. Like yesterday, I had slept in much longer than intended because of how late I had finally fallen asleep after cleaning up after the fake bedwetting incident. Unlike yesterday, Mom had come to investigate why I hadn’t gotten out of bed at a reasonable time. I had woken up to the sight of her standing over me at the foot of the sleeping bag. The second night of waking up on the floor was less disorientating than the first. I knew right away both where I was and why I was there. I had intentionally peed on the bed, and Grace had helped me clean up. I stretched my mouth open in a wide yawn and rubbed my eyes. This was not how I had intended for my mom to find out about the bedwetting. I would have preferred a discreet conversation once I was fully awake rather than be wakened to her witnessing the aftermath of it. I had less control of my secrets than I thought I did. “What happened?” Mom asked. The question irked me. The answer seemed rather obvious. Why else would I be in a sleeping bag? And why else would all the sheets and blankets have been taken off of the mattress? Why was Mom insisting that I spell it out for her? I didn’t bother describing the elaborate dream I had made up for Grace last night. “Um,” I said, my gaze fixed on Mom’s slippers rather than her face. “It happened again.” Mom sighed. “I did tell you that you shouldn’t have had so much to drink last night.” That was true. Mom had caught me in the middle of drinking one more glass of water before going to bed. I had worried that it would have caused problems with being able to pee on the bed, but I still had been hydrated enough to do so. The last thing I needed was for Mom to be fixated on how much liquids I was drinking. “I was thirsty. And it’s not like that’s caused problems before.” “And it’s not like you’ve ever wet the bed before, much less two times in a row,” Mom said. “I think it would be good if you drank a little bit less in the evening.” There wasn’t anything I could say to argue back against that. From Mom’s perspective, it was a completely reasonable request. From what I could recall, Grace had been under similar restrictions back when she was a bedwetter. I would just need to be more discreet when getting extra water to drink today. There were footsteps in the hallway. Then Grace walked by, passing my open bedroom door on the way to her own bedroom. Mom turned around just in time to briefly make eye contact with Grace before my older sister scurried off. Great. Now, Mom and Grace both knew that each other knew about my bedwetting. Mom rushed over to close the door. “I’m sorry,” Mom said. “I’ll talk with your sister and make sure she respects your privacy. I should have closed the door behind me when I came to get you up.” “It’s fine. She found out last night. She helped me get it cleaned.” “Oh,” Mom said. “That was nice of her.” “Yeah,” I said. Best to get the full truth out. “She knows that I know about her past bedwetting as well.” “I see,” Mom said. “Still, I’ll have a talk with her later this morning. Did you start the washing machine last night?” “Yeah.” “Well, no one else has started on any laundry this morning, so it’s still in there. Please move it over to the dryer before you get in the shower.” Mom left the bedroom without giving me any further instructions. It was Sunday morning. That sucked cause it meant the weekend was already halfway over. The only good thing was that I only had one more week left of school before summer break. That also meant that our soccer tournament was continuing this afternoon. We had a game scheduled for right after lunch, and there would be another one early in the evening if we won. All that exercise would at least give me plenty of excuses to drink more water. I rolled up my sleeping bag and tucked it back in the closet. I stood and stretched for a couple of minutes before heading downstairs to move the bedding over to the dryer. I wasn’t super sore from having slept on the floor, but I was beginning to notice the effects of having done so for two nights in a row. <><><> Getting hydrated was a lot more difficult when everyone was monitoring how much I was drinking. My problems with getting enough to drink started as soon as I got home from the soccer match. I had gone through two bottles of Gatorade while I had been playing, but with how hot it had been during the game, I was sure I had practically sweated it all out. We’d lost three to zero in the sweltering heat, and the score would have been even more lopsided if not for some heroic saves by Angie, who was the team’s goalie. And that was the end of soccer – at least playing competitively on a team – until it was time to try out for the middle school team in the fall. There were some summers when I had played in a summer league with Angie and Emma, but with the lengthy vacation my parents had planned to celebrate my sister’s high school graduation, that wasn’t an option this year. That had been disappointing, but Mom and Dad had made it up to me by signing me up for a week-long, overnight soccer camp instead. After having taken a quick shower, I thought I had the kitchen to myself as I retrieved a plastic cup from the cupboard and grabbed the filtered water from the fridge. Still, it wouldn’t do to dawdle. I needed to drink the water quickly. I lifted the cup to my lips and tilted my head back as I began to chug down the water as fast as possible. It wasn’t fast enough. I had gotten halfway through the cup of water when I heard my sister’s voice behind me. “Not sure that’s a good idea.” The shock of hearing Grace’s voice, especially when I had been so certain that she had been tucked away in her bedroom, caused my hand to slip. Instead of continuing to pour the water into my mouth, I splashed a large amount onto my chin and T-shirt. I turned to face my sister. “Seriously, don’t sneak up on me like that.” Graced eyed the wet spots on my shirt as I wiped my chin dry on my sleeve. My face burned. It brought me back to how she had looked at me in the hallway last night when it had been my pajama pants rather than my T-shirt that had been wet. Grace grimaced a little, as if she wasn’t entirely comfortable with what she was about to say. “Look, I know from experience that, um, drinking as much water as you’re drinking right now isn’t always a good idea.” She looked around as if she was making sure no one was eavesdropping on the conversation and then leaned in closer to me. “Probably best to limit your liquids until bed unless you like waking up to change your sheets in the middle of the night.” My chest froze at that last whispered sentence from Grace. What, why would she think that I – or anyone – would like waking up to a wet bed? “What? I don’t like it.” Grace rolled her eyes. “I know you don’t like it. It’s just a figure of speech.” “But I can’t, like, not drink anything at all,” I protested. “I’m not saying that you shouldn’t drink anything,” Grace said. “But, like, chugging a sixteen-ounce cup of water isn’t exactly going to make things easier on your bladder tonight.” It wasn’t as if I could very well argue with her about that point. My older sister was the expert on bedwetting, after all. I emptied the remainder of the water from the glass into the sink. I would need to find other opportunities to stay hydrated. That proved to be difficult. <><><> Grace had helped Mom and Dad set the table for dinner. We always sat in the same spot around the table. Our parents sat on one end together, with Jackson next to Mom, so she could keep him in line. Grace sat next to Dad, and I was sandwiched between my two siblings. The glass of water in front of my plate was technically full, but Grace had also filled it to the brim with ice, so there was only about half as much water in it as normal. Not that I could say anything about it at the moment. The last thing I needed was for Jackson to find out about the bedwetting as well. He would not handle it as discretely as I had with Grace when I was his age. I desperately wanted to excuse myself from the table to refill my glass of water, but I had a sinking feeling that Mom and Dad would definitely say something about it. They wouldn’t outright tell me that I should drink less to avoid wetting the bed – not in front of Jackson – but I suspected they would encourage me to drink less, and I didn’t want to deal with that embarrassing conversation. I stared at the glass of ice as I took another bite of spaghetti, as if I could mentally make the ice cubes begin to melt a little bit faster. By the time I was finished eating my spaghetti, enough ice had melted to allow me to have one more small sip before it was time to take the dishes to the kitchen for Grace to get them washed. The rest of the evening didn’t go any better. It seemed like every time I got up to walk past the kitchen, Mom, Dad, or Grace were in sight. That was a problem. I needed them to think I was wetting the bed naturally, like whatever genetics had caused Grace to be a bedwetter was now doing it for me. If my parents thought that the bedwetting was only due to how much water I was drinking, I worried they might focus on that rather than purchase pull-ups. I managed to sneak in a few sips of water here and there, but it wasn’t nearly as much as I’d had to drink the other night. I also put off going to the bathroom. The last time I had peed had been shortly before dinner. Even without as much to drink, if I went from then until midnight, surely I’d need to pee badly enough at that point that wetting the bed wouldn’t be difficult. <><><> It was a school night, so I was sent to bed a bit earlier. I was in the middle of brushing my teeth when Mom peeked into the bathroom. “Madelyn,” Mom said. I took the toothbrush out of my mouth so that I could reply. “Yes?” “Make sure you use the toilet before you go to bed, OK?” “I will,” I replied, trying to keep the annoyance out of my voice. I didn’t want to be treated like a baby who had to be reminded to go to the toilet, even if Mom did think I’d had two actually bedwetting accidents so far this weekend. I brushed my teeth for another ten seconds and then shut the bathroom door behind me. Was Mom still out in the hallway? I couldn’t tell if her footsteps had carried her all the way to the stairs or if she had just gone to her bedroom. There also hadn’t been a sound of any doors closing. That was a problem. The bathroom wasn’t very soundproof. Mom might be able to notice if I didn’t pee at all, as should would be able to hear me if I did go like she had asked. I didn’t need to pee all that badly at this point, but I did need to go enough that I shouldn’t have trouble peeing as long as I was sitting on a toilet rather than in my bed. I lifted the lid to the toilet seat, let my pajamas fall to my feet, and sat down. I had to find a way to convince Mom and Dad that none of their other methods of getting me to stop wetting the bed – limiting fluids and making me use the toilet right before going to sleep – were working. I needed to reach the point where they would give up trying to stop the bedwetting and switch their focus to limiting the damage from it by getting me pull-ups to wear. That meant that I needed to convince them that I was doing my best to avoid wetting the bed, so I would have to use the toilet now and try to figure out a way to still wet the bed later tonight. I didn’t have any difficulty in getting my bladder to release. The sound of the urine streaming into the toilet was proof that I had done exactly what Mom had asked me to. I had hoped that I’d perhaps be able to stop the stream mid-pee, giving myself a better chance to wet the bed later, but that wasn’t successful. Once my bladder started to empty, there was no stopping it until every last drop was out. I took a peek in my parents’ bedroom after leaving the bathroom. Mom was lying in bed on top of the sheets, reading a book. That was a problem. There would be no sneaking any more drinks of water tonight, not even the yucky tap water from the bathroom sink. The next two hours passed slowly. My eyes were sore from staring at my phone by the time I was certain that everyone was asleep. There had to be a better way of faking the bedwetting, but every alternative I’d considered so far had presented some sort of complication, something that would risk Mom and Dad – and now Grace as well – discovering that something was off about my bedwetting. I had to stick to faking the bedwetting in a way that looked perfectly natural. There couldn’t be any doubt in my parents’ minds that it was real. With the clock now past midnight, I still didn’t feel like I needed to pee at all, but I was determined to try either way. I sat on my knees on the bed for about ten minutes until I could barely keep my eyes open. It was the same routine I had followed the past two nights. I strained as hard as I could, trying to conjure pictures of water and rivers and streams in my head. It was no use. I couldn’t get anything to come out. My bladder was still too empty. I nearly lay down in bed in resignation, but another plan to fake my bedwetting suddenly sprang to mind. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com/

Chapter 8: Equals Grace clasped both of her hands over her mouth, holding back a muffled reaction that might have otherwise woken up the rest of our family. My hands remained on the front of my pajama pants, as pointless as it was to remain in the posture as I wasn’t able to fully conceal how I had peed myself. Neither of us moved. I couldn’t take my eyes off of my sister. As much as I had worked to avoid it, I had known that it was a possibility that Grace might find out about my faked bedwetting. As a former bedwetter herself, my older sister would be attuned to the signs that something might be off about me. And it was certainly better than having my younger brother or friends discover this secret. But of all the ways Grace could have discovered my fake bedwetting, this had to be among the worst. I had anticipated something much less dramatic and certainly much less embarrassing. I couldn’t stand in front of my parents’ bedroom door forever. That was not a feasible plan. There were only a couple of directions I go could. Returning to my room wasn’t an option. Doing so would require going toward my sister. I was definitely not going to do anything to wake up my parents at this point and turn my bedwetting incident into a whole family affair. Running down the stairs in the dark wasn’t an option, either. That left the bathroom. I dashed inside it with a few quick steps, closing the door as gently as I could while also shutting it quickly. I was safe. Safe, but trapped. I listened at the door, hoping that Grace would go back to her room and give me some privacy to get back to my bedroom and get cleaned up. At least let me change into a dry set of pajamas. I was having no such luck. I flipped on the light switch. Even if I hadn’t peed quite as much as last night, my pants didn’t appear any less soaked. Enough time had passed, and the wet clothes were already beginning to get uncomfortable as the initial warmth faded away. The expression on my older sister’s face had left no doubt that there had been enough light in the hallway for her to notice how wet my pajamas were. And she had been a bedwetter. If it had been Jackson instead, I perhaps could have tried to say I had just spilled a glass of water on myself. My six-year-old brother might have been gullible enough to fall for that, especially if he was still a bit drowsy. But Grace? No, she knew exactly what wet pants looked like from having wet the bed. I heard footsteps in the hallway. I held my breath. Then there were two soft taps on the bathroom door. There was some faint whispering from the other side of the door, but I couldn’t make out what was being said. I breathed out. Grace wasn’t going to let me avoid having this conversation. I leaned forward and pressed my ear up against the door in an attempt to make out what my sister was saying. There was another series of soft taps on the door, followed again by my sister’s voice. This time, I could make out what she was saying, if just barely. “Is everything OK in there? I can help. Promise I’m not going to judge you or anything.” If I hadn’t known about my sister’s previous bedwetting, it might have been harder to trust that statement. But I figured that I could. She had actually gone through what I was only attempting to fake. I stepped back and pulled the door open. Grace at least had the courtesy this time to not stare down right at the wet spot on my pajama pants. But what was she thinking as she was looking at me? Did Grace see a reflection of herself from six years ago? If I were to go back and look at our old family photo albums from that vacation, it would be plain to anyone that I was almost an exact carbon-copy of her when she was my age. I realized that I probably looked the same to her as she had looked to me when I had watched her walk up the staircase in her wet pajamas six years ago. “I can help you get things cleaned up, but I really need to pee first.” I had been so absorbed in my own embarrassment and concern about what my sister was seeing and thinking that I hadn’t noticed how she was a bit fidgety herself. Had she perhaps woken up just in time to avoid having an actual bedwetting accident herself? Graced squeezed past me into the bathroom as I stepped out into the hallway and made a beeline back to my bedroom. That we hadn’t woken up our parents or Jackson was a minor miracle with how we had been going back and forth in the upstairs hallway. I used my shirt to pat myself dry after taking off my pajama pants and underwear. It wasn’t nearly as good as hopping in the shower to get myself washed off, but it would have to do for now. I turned and stared at my wet bedding. I just had to remember that it wasn’t like Grace hadn’t seen anything like this before. This had been her own nightly reality for years. The toilet flushed in the distance. I kept my back to the bedroom door. My hands were starting to shake. I tried to keep my mind focused on the prize at the end of the road. Soon, I’d be wearing pull-ups to bed each night. I’d only have to endure the embarrassment of peeing on the bed for a short while before I’d get those pull-ups. And then it would be incredibly easy to discreetly continue faking the bedwetting. The handle on the bedroom door rattled behind me as Grace made her way into the room, shutting the door behind herself. This was rare territory for my sister to be in. We typically respected the privacy of each other’s rooms, only opening them a bit if there was a message that needed to be passed along. Graced walked up beside me with her eyes fixed on the aftermath of my fake bedwetting incident. “Do you need a hug?” I nodded, leaning in toward my sister as she pulled me into a firm embrace and rubbed her hand on my back. My hands were no longer shaking a few seconds later. “It’s nothing to worry about,” Grace said. “I promise I’m not going to tell anyone about it.” I waited expectantly. Surely, if there was any time for her to bring up her own history of bedwetting, this would be it. It would make sense for Grace to use that as a way to try to comfort me. And that would be my chance, the chance to ask all of the questions about her bedwetting that I had been dying to ask the past few years. But, for whatever reason, Grace didn’t seem willing to bring that subject up. “So,” Grace said, her gaze again turned toward the bed. I thought back to the question Mom had asked me the other night. She had asked me if I had a dream about going to the toilet while I was asleep. That seemed like a plausible excuse to give to my older sister, though I provided more embellishment than I did with Mom last night. I described an elaborate, made-up dream to Grace, one that I hadn’t thought was a dream at the time, so when the urge to pee happened, I hadn’t realized that I needed to wake up to avoid peeing the bed. “So yeah,” I said, concluding the tale. “I thought I had made it to the toilet in time, but then I felt something wet, and I woke up.” “You probably had too much to drink this evening.” “No, I didn’t.” Grace gave me a bit of side-eye. “I recall that someone refilled her glass a couple of times at dinner.” “Yeah, that’s just the stir-fry was spicy.” Grace rolled her eyes. “Come on, it wasn’t that bad. So, anyway, were you going to tell Mom and Dad about the accident?” There was a truthful answer for me to give to that question. “I… I was going to ask for help with getting things cleaned up. But I decided I’d rather take care of it on my own.” “I can help bring things down to the laundry room. But you can’t go to bed before getting the mattress cleaned up. I’ll have to see if there are some cleaning chemicals that would work for it.” I helped Grace strip the bed. Like last night, there was a sizable wet spot on the mattress. The thin, cotton mattress protector wasn’t up to the task of handling things when an entire bladder was emptied onto it. There was no sign that Jackson or our parents had been disturbed from their sleep as we ventured out into the hallway and made our way down to the basement. Grace was carrying most of the bedding while I held my wet pajamas in one hand and my phone in the other to light the way down the stairs. How would I be reacting if I had actually wet the bed without intending to do it? I decided to try to play down the bedwetting accident. “I really don’t know what happened,” I said as I tossed my wet pajamas into the washing machine. “I’ve never had anything happen like this since like when I was a baby.” Grace gave me that look. The one that said she knew that was a terrible liar, which, a lot of the time, was true. “You didn’t wet the bed last night as well?” I tried to make my response sound as indignant as possible. “No, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Grace put her hands on her waist. “So, all of your bedding was in the dryer before breakfast for no reason at all? Like I said, it’s not a big deal. You don’t need to lie about it.” My face suddenly felt rather warm. Here I was, thinking I had been quite sneaky in managing to get my bedding back up to my room without being caught. And Grace had known about it all day long and hadn’t said a single word to me. Grace’s curiosity was beginning to get annoying. Time to turn the tables on her. “So what? You were a bedwetter until you were my age.” Grace’s face momentarily blanched, and then she regained her composure. “Me, no. I don’t know what you are talking about.” It was my turn to get annoyed at my sister for not being truthful with me. “It’s not a big deal. You don’t need to lie about it.” It was Grace’s turn for her face to go as red as mine had a few seconds earlier. “How? That was forever ago?” I recounted the tale about how I had accidentally stumbled across the scene of her having wet the bed that time we had been visiting our grandparents six years ago, from overhearing her conversation with Mom to watching her walk up the stairs in obviously wet pajamas. The expression on Grace’s face told me that she remembered that fateful night as well. “Mom and Dad caught me after you went upstairs. They made me promise to not tell anyone about it,” I said. “They said I wasn’t to ever say anything about it to you, either.” My voice dropped off at the conclusion of the tale, and we stood silently as the washing machine begin rumbling after having filled up with water. My shame at having my bedwetting discovered had dissolved now that I had forced Grace to admit her own bedwetting past. We were equals now. I was now burning with curiosity. There were so many things I wanted to know. Chief among them was if Grace had ever worn pull-ups to bed. I desperately needed to know if that was something my parents had ever used with her. But there were other things I was curious about as well, such as information that could help me better fake my own bedwetting in the coming weeks. How often had she wet the bed? Did it typically happen at certain times of the night? Did she usually pee a lot or a little when it happened? It was as if Grace could read my mind. “I don’t want to talk about it, OK?” she said. “Let’s just get your mattress cleaned up, and then we can get some sleep.” I silently accepted her refusal to say anything further on the matter. With our secrets now revealed to each other, perhaps I’d get another chance to talk with Grace about it once she had gotten over the fact that I had known about her bedwetting for the past six years. We returned to my bedroom, stopping at a closet while Grace showed me which cleaning supplies would be best for removing the urine stains and odor from the mattress. She walked me through the process of drying and cleaning the mattress. That was going to be helpful for future nights when I would preferably be handling this process all on my own. “That should do it,” Grace said as she finished dusting the wet spot with baking soda. “That will need to be brushed or vacuumed off in the morning.” She turned around after taking a couple of steps toward the door. “You really should hop in the shower before you get in the sleeping bag. Otherwise, you’re going to wake up smelling like pee.” I suspected that this was advice Grace had learned from experience. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com

Thanks, We'll be sticking with Maddy's POV for this story, but we'll continue to get lots of details about her family/friends. Nope A little more than before, but, like Maddy considered in the chapter, all she would have to do is not fake the bedwetting and she'd still be able to move on from it at any point. Regardless of how it happened, I think it would have been difficult for Maddy to keep her secret safe from Grace in the long run, since her older sister is very familiar with all the ins and outs of bedwetting. Very much so. The main question is going to be if Grace knows that Maddy knows that she was a bedwetter, and is either of them going to be willing to bring up that topic?

Chapter 7: Bedwetters Six years ago The concept of bedwetting wasn’t something that had ever crossed my mind as a young kid. I had been dry at night nearly immediately after being toilet trained during the day. There wasn’t a distinction between being potty trained during the day or potty trained during the night. If someone was potty trained, that meant that they never wet their pants at all. Period. That changed when I learned my sister was a bedwetter. In retrospect, the signs of Grace’s bedwetting were practically everywhere. But when I was six years old, the idea of my older sister peeing in her sleep was so completely inconceivable that I would never have entertained it. All the indicators that Grace was a bedwetter went completely over my head. And, looking back at it, there were many. While the washing machine and dryer were inaudible from all the way up in my bedroom, the kitchen was close enough to the basement staircase that the rumbling sounds from either machine could be heard every morning during breakfast. The distant sound of laundry tumbling in the dryer was a consistent part of the background noise in the house as I ate my regular breakfast of cereal. But I didn’t think anything of it as I munched on my Captain Crunch pieces. I was more concerned with making sure I ate them before they got soggy than anything else that was going on around me. Besides, I hadn’t known a time when the dryer wasn’t turned on around the time that I was eating breakfast, so I paid it no more heed than to the sound of Dad watching the morning news in the other room or Mom scurrying about the kitchen, prepping our lunches to take to school. A family of four shouldn’t produce so much laundry that the dryer would need to be run every day. But that wasn’t something I’d have considered at that age. The dryer simply ran nearly every morning, and that was that. If I had paid attention, I would have been tipped off by the times Grace had tip-toed past me while carrying a bundle of freshly cleaned bedding. But even when I did notice, I didn’t think much of it. Laundry was just one of my sister’s chores at the time, and chores were a topic I didn’t want any more familiarity with. Chores were a concept my parents had introduced to me last year, complete with a magnet chart on the fridge for documenting my progress toward earning various rewards. For me, that meant making sure all my toys were put away each evening, making my bed in the morning, and other random age-appropriate tasks around the house. And then there was the question of pajamas. Grace usually showered and changed first thing in the morning, so I didn’t often see her in her pajamas after I had gotten out of bed myself, but there were times when she was wearing a different set of pajamas than what I had seen her in when she had been brushing her teeth in the bathroom the night before. I certainly noticed, but it would never have occurred to me that she would have changed pajamas because she had peed on her first pair of them. I just figured she must have gotten uncomfortable in the middle of the night. Then, there was the fact that my sister never had any sleepovers. My first sleepover actually came before she had a chance to do one. My first sleepover had come a week into the summer after graduating from kindergarten when I’d had Emma sleepover at my house for the first time. It was another few years before Angie’s parents would allow her to join in on our sleepovers. Looking back on it, the fact that Grace hadn’t complained at all about not going on sleepovers when I was allowed to have one was another sign that she had been perfectly comfortable avoiding spending the night with friends, likely out of fear of her bedwetting being discovered. My sister’s room was very much off-limits, especially when my friends were over. I was sure there were plenty of reasons that a twelve-year-old wouldn’t want their six-year-old sister snooping around, but in retrospect, I wondered if I would have found evidence of her bedwetting had I searched then rather than waiting another three years until after Grace had learned to stay dry at night. Grace took the privacy of her bedroom very seriously. The door remained shut at all times, even when she wasn’t in it. She even went so far as to put a “keep out” sign on her door. She had even tried to get Mom and Dad to let her put a lock on her door, but that request had gotten shut down right away. Then there were the reminders to use the toilet before bed. Something that got said a lot more to Grace than to me. There had been times in the evening when Grace had asked for something to drink, only to have Mom or Dad tell her that it was too late for that. Watson might have declared the evidence to be “elementary” at this point, but Sherlock Holmes I was not. My six-year-old brain lacked the necessary deduction skills to put it all together. That was until the proof of my sister’s bedwetting became undeniable. <><><> I groaned as I opened my eyes. It was still dark out. Very dark out. It was such an inopportune time to wake up. I had been rudely pulled out of the most fascinating dream involving panda bears, a field trip to the art museum, and a boy band my sister liked. Why was I even awake now in the first place? I swallowed. My mouth felt dry. It was enough of a nuisance that I wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep until I’d gotten something to drink. A year ago, I would have called out to Mom and Dad until one of them had woken up to get me a glass of water. They were usually reluctant to give me anything more than a couple of sips. That annoyed me, but I understood later why they were so insistent on limiting fluids. They soon got tired of getting me something to drink, and I was informed that I was a big enough girl to get out of bed and get a glass of water all by myself. But this situation was a little different. It would have been one thing if we had been at home. There, I knew the contours of our house well enough to navigate downstairs without needing to turn on any lights. But here, in the guest house we were staying at while visiting my grandparents, I didn’t even know where the light switch was, let alone the doorway. I sat in bed for several minutes while my eyes gradually adjusted to the dark; it was a moonless night on a rural property, so even then, I could only barely make out the outline of where the bedroom door might be. I nearly fell off of the bed when I rolled over onto my side. I had forgotten that it was only half the size of the bed I had back in my bedroom. I took cautious steps in a straight line toward what appeared to be the bedroom door until, at last, I had my hand on the cold doorknob. I expected darkness when I swung open the bedroom door, but there was a hint of light from the end of the hallway, coming from the stairs that led down to the main floor. That was where I needed to go. There weren’t any glasses in the upstairs bathroom. There were two upstairs bedrooms, one for me and one for my parents. My older sister was sleeping downstairs on a pull-out sofa. What was she doing up this late? The door to the bedroom my parents were using was open. I peeked inside it. It was only Dad in there. That explained the downstairs light. Mom must have gotten up with my six-month-old brother to feed him. At least that meant that there was a light on, so it would be easier to find my way to the kitchen. As I approached the top of the staircase, I heard some voices. It was my mom and my sister, interspersed with some soft crying from Jackson. I got the sense that this somehow wasn’t a conversation I was supposed to be listening to, but curiosity got the better of me. I tip-toed quietly down the carpeted stairs and then inched along the hallway until I could see into the room where my sister had been sleeping. I had to blink a couple of times to make sure I wasn’t in some sort of strange dream. My sister was wearing pajama pants that were paired with one of those extra-long T-shirts she always wore to bed, the kind that could practically double as a dress. It wasn’t the type of pajamas my sister was wearing, but their condition that caught my attention. There was a large wet spot on my sister’s pajamas. My initial thought was that Grace must have accidentally spilled water on herself. But that didn’t track. She seemed rather upset. I looked up at her face and saw that she was crying. No reason to be that upset over a spilled glass of water. Mom, who was holding Jackson, was standing close by. I wasn’t able to make out the expression on her face, but the tone of her voice suggested she wasn’t all that happy with my sister. Then, there was the location of the wet spot on her pajama pants. Yeah, it definitely wasn’t water. “I told you that I had packed it for you, Grace.” Mom said. “Why didn’t you—” “Mom,” Grace interrupted. “I told you already. I just forgot about it. Anyway, I’m not a baby.” “I’m not saying you are,” Mom said. “Which means you need to be more responsible.” Mom looked down at where Grace had been sleeping. I couldn’t see from here, but I guessed that the accident had gotten all over the bedding and perhaps the couch as well. “Just go hop in the shower,” Mom said. “I’ll try to figure out how to get this cleaned up. There have to be some cleaning supplies somewhere.” That was my cue to skedaddle. But with Grace now headed in my direction, I belatedly realized that there wasn’t any way to get up the stairs without her noticing me. Instead, I back away into an adjacent room, hoping to keep out of sight of my sister and my mom. Once Grace was heading up the stairs, I peeked out again and got a good look at her pajamas. There could be no disputing it. My sister had peed herself. I really didn’t know how to react to this revelation. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen a kid wet their pants before. That had happened to other students on three occasions during my kindergarten year. But that was different; those kids had either been too scared of the school restrooms or too scared of their teacher to ask for permission to go potty. This was my sister. She was about to be a teenager. And she had peed herself despite the fact that there was a perfectly good and accessible toilet only a few feet away from her. How? Why? It made no sense. It was just confusing, and I wasn’t quite convinced that I wasn’t still dreaming up this wacky scene. “Madelyn.” Mom’s voice was hushed, but I could sense her irritation through the use of my full first name. It turned out that my hiding spot wasn’t quite as hidden as I thought it had been. “What are you doing up?” “Um, I woke up. I was thirsty and wanted something to drink.” There was simply no way I could hold the question inside. “Did Grace pee her pants?” Mom glanced toward the staircase before answering me. “For some kids, like your sister, their bladder sometimes forgets that it is supposed to hold their pee in while they are asleep. It’s not your sister’s fault she had a bedwetting accident. Some kids, like you, grow out of it right when they are potty trained. It takes a lot longer for other kids.” That was a lot to take in all at once. Bedwetting. That was a new word for me. Perhaps it helped to define what was happening to my sister as something separate from toilet training. “Hey,” Dad said. He was not using his nighttime voice. “Heard that there was someone in the shower and then saw that no one was in bed.” “Grace had a bedwetting accident,” Mom said. Dad turned to look at me and then back at Mom. Mom sighed, adjusting her grip on Jackson, who was beginning to squirm. “Maddy already knows now. She found out because she was getting something to drink.” Dad completely brushed off the news about the bedwetting as if it was something that was completely normal and expected. “Do we think that getting something to drink is a good idea?” He asked. “But I’m thirsty,” I complained. My mouth was still very dry. “Drinking lots of water at night can sometimes lead to bedwetting accidents for kids,” Dad said. “But I don’t ever wet the bed when I drink water at night.” “Maddy does have a point,” Mom said. “Fine,” Dad responded. “But if she ruins a mattress, you can explain it to your parents.” “Go on,” Mom said to me. I went off to the kitchen but only took the tiniest sip of water. Despite my protestations that I had never wet the bed before, I was now suddenly very concerned that it could happen if I were to drink too much. I set the glass down without finishing it off and began to walk toward the stairs. “Hold up,” Dad said. “There’s something we need to talk about first.” I paused at the foot of the stairs. “While it is normal for some kids to have bedwetting issues, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t embarrassing or that other people who aren’t nice might tease your sister about it. You are not to tell anyone else that your sister wets the bed. That’s a private issue, not to be shared with anyone other than our family. Secondly, you aren’t to mention this at all to your sister. Not to tease her. Not because you’re curious. Not at all.” I understood from the way Dad’s tone had changed that this was a very serious request. “I won’t tell anyone. I promise.” The shower was still running when I slipped past the upstairs bathroom on my way back to bed. <><><> Present time I had figured that wetting the bed a second time would be a lot easier. I was wrong. Like last night, I was waiting anxiously for the clock to strike midnight. Unlike last night, the urge to pee was present, but not nearly as overwhelming. While I still had drunk more liquids than normal over the course of the afternoon and evening, I hadn’t been as thorough in my hydration as yesterday. It didn’t help that Mom had caught me drinking water in the kitchen. I had planned to drink some water from the bathroom sink, but all it took was one sip of unfiltered water to deter me from doing that. I wanted pull-ups, but not that badly. Her concern over what I was drinking in the evening could turn out to be a problem, especially as the bedwetting would be turning into a pattern rather than a random one-off occurrence. Perhaps I would be able to get comfortable enough with peeing myself so that I wouldn’t need to drink excessive amounts of water to do so. I’d been lying in bed for about an hour and a half now. The first twenty minutes of that had been spent listening to Chester paw at my door. The cat’s efforts at opening the door had thankfully proven to be unsuccessful. He’d probably gone back downstairs to bother my parents. That was followed by the sound of my sister leaving her room momentarily to brush her teeth. I’d picked one of my least favorite pajama outfits for the night. It was a hand-me-down shirt from my sister. This one had a bit of special significance. It was the same T-shirt she had worn that night when I found out about her bedwetting. That was paired with some pink pajama pants with hearts on them. I wouldn’t mind if either the shirt or pants got ruined because of the bedwetting. I had kept the promise I had made to my parents six years ago. My lips had stayed completely shut. As far as I knew, Grace had no idea that I had ever known about her bedwetting. I hadn’t even brought up the subject again with our parents. If I could make it through the next week or so without Grace catching on, I’d be able to keep this bedwetting secret from her as long as my parents purchased pull-ups for me. I thought back to all the signs that had been present when Grace had been a bedwetter. I knew what I needed to avoid if I were to keep my own secret safe. That night at my Grandparents’ house had been the only time where I had stumbled across evidence of my sister’s bedwetting. That raised a lot of questions. Was her bedwetting something that was super frequent at that point, or had she, at the same age I was now, already been outgrowing her bedwetting phase? But there were other questions that remained unanswered. The fact that there had been laundry washed every morning suggested that Grace either hadn’t been wearing pull-ups to bed or that they had been totally ineffective in keeping her sheets dry. Did my parents even realize that pull-ups were an option for my older sister? Or had they – or she – decided that pull-ups weren’t how they were going to manage her bedwetting? But what about that time at my grandparents’ place? Yes, Grace had wet the bed on the first night, but as far as I knew, there hadn’t been a repeat during that week-long stay. Was it possible that she had worn a pull-up the rest of the nights there? A lot of those questions could have been answered if I had ever managed to work up the courage to ask my older sister, but a promise was a promise, so I followed my parent’s rules even after they had let me know that Grace’s bedwetting phase had ended – a move they made one vacation when they had Grace and I share a bed for the first time. I had been greatly reassured, knowing that my sister wasn’t going to pee all over me in her sleep. The telltale signs of Mom and Dad heading to bed had passed twenty minutes ago. It was likely that they were both already asleep by now. Dad’s snoring wasn’t quite as loud as last night, but I could still make it out occasionally. But all the certainty leading up to this moment was again beginning to fall away. Until last night, the idea of pretending to wet the bed had been a fantasy. It had been a fun thing to think about as I went through how different scenarios might play out in my head, all of them ending with Mom bringing me aside for a private conversation where she would reveal that she had purchased pull-ups for me to wear to bed. It had been a constant daydream over the past year as I slowly worked up the courage to finally act on my desires. But now I knew what the reality of bedwetting was like. And it wasn’t quite like how things had gone in my daydreams. Bedwetting sucked when doing it while not wearing pull-ups. It was one thing to have to inform my parents of the accident; there was no getting around that if I were to convince them that pull-ups were needed, but it was something else to have the evidence of my wet pajamas and bed displayed right in front of them. I could picture the expression on Mom’s face from last night, and I dreaded having to see it again. I nearly faltered. I nearly got up and walked to the bathroom. I nearly convinced myself that I could call it quits. But there was one thing that was stopping me. The one reassurance was that I could always stop. If faking the bedwetting got to be too difficult or too embarrassing, if I somehow found that the pull-ups didn’t live up to my expectations, all I would have to do was stop wetting the bed. I could end it as easily as it was beginning. But the one thing I couldn’t do was go through my plan only halfway. I needed to either be fully committed to it or not do it at all. The bedwetting had to be consistent and frequent if I was going to get my parents to buy me those pull-ups. I kept trying – and failing – to get my bladder to release while I was lying down in bed. I wanted the accident to look as natural as possible, but no matter how I positioned myself – lying on my side, front, or back – I was not able to get myself to pee. But there was something other than just making sure my deceit wouldn’t be found out by my parents. I wanted to know what it felt like to have an actual bedwetting accident, not just squat over my sheets and pee. But another five minutes passed by without any results. I yawned. I had two options. Figure out a way to pee or go to sleep. I got up on my knees the way I had done the night before. I turned my mind to thoughts of things that were wet. A minute later, there was a wetness and warmth in my underwear, followed by the sound of urine streaming onto the bed, proof that the method I had discovered last night had worked again. Like last night, once I had started peeing, I found it impossible to stop once everything was out. And also, like last night, the feeling of the wet clothes against my skin was barely tolerable. I picked up my phone and turned the flashlight app on. The wet spot wasn’t as big as last night, but it would more than do. It was time to get the hard part over with. So there I was, still in my soaked underwear and pants and my slightly wet shirt, staring right at my parents’ bedroom door. I’d turned off the flashlight app on my phone once I’d gotten out to the hallway. I didn’t need to make my accident any more obvious than it was already. I tried to knock. I really did. I must have raised my hand up a half-dozen times, but each time, I held my fist aloft in the air for a few seconds before letting my arm drop back down. I thought about how Mom had reacted last night. She hadn’t been upset at me, but I could tell that having to get out of bed that late had been a nuisance, especially with how she had needed to get the laundry started and clean up the mattress. Even if I had experienced a real bedwetting accident, I would have felt bad about having to make Mom clean up after me like that. If I had made a mess in the house any other time during the day, I’d be expected to clean it up on my own without any assistance. Why should this be any different? Besides, all my parents needed to know was that I had an accident. Maybe there wasn’t a need to wake them. All the bedding in the washing machine would be proof enough of that in the morning. That was a much better idea. I would change out of my wet pajamas and then take all of my wet clothing and bedding down to the basement. I could at least get a washing cycle started, and then it all could be moved to the dryer in the morning. I wouldn’t need to hide the bedwetting from my parents, but it would be much less humiliating to tell them in the morning, or perhaps they would figure it out on their own by the fact that I was doing laundry, which would make a difficult conversation a little easier. That meant I was going to have to figure out how to clean the bed. I guessed that if I were to check the closet, I would be able to recognize the cleaning solutions Mom had used last night. In less than twenty minutes or so, I’d have everything all cleaned up, and I could be tucked into a sleeping bag on the floor. I’d made my decision. Waiting until the morning for my parents to find out about this latest bedwetting accident would make things a lot easier. I was right about to head back to my room when Grace’s bedroom door swung wide open, and she stepped out into the hallway. I could have sworn that she was asleep already. I hadn’t noticed any light coming from under her door, and I had heard her brushing her teeth in the bathroom shortly after I had gone to bed myself. I stood frozen in place. There was no escape. The light from her bedroom illuminated the hallway, reaching out all the way to where I was standing. My hands slid down in front of my waist, but even had they been able to completely obscure the wet spot before Grace had a chance to see it, just the motion of hiding that part of my body would have been enough to arouse her suspicions. We locked eyes. She appeared just as surprised to see me as I was to see her. Neither of us said anything. Grace’s expression changed from the casual surprise of seeing me to concern over what must be the obvious embarrassment showing on my face. I watched in horror as my sister’s eyes drifted down to my waist, her pupils expanding as she took in the sight of my hands held in front of my wet pajamas. --- Links to all my stories can be found at https://abdlwriter.wordpress.com